China: Water price ‘needs to shoot up’

The authorities need to push ahead with a price hike, reflecting accurately the growing shortage of water in China and help plug further depletion of the resource, an official has said.

“We must set up a rational water pricing system adapted to the country’s severe shortage of water. So some cities will face a sharp rise in water prices,” Hu Siyi, vice-minister of water resources, told the Beijing Times on Sunday.

The average domestic water price in 36 large and medium-sized cities last year was 3.77 yuan (55 US cents) per ton, an annual increase of 4.7 percent, latest official statistics showed.

“But the price does not reflect the current situation of the severe water shortage plaguing the country, leading to water wastage and pollution,” Hu said, adding that the needs of lower-income residents and industrial usage would be factored in while deciding on the price hike.

In Beijing, authorities have kept water prices at 3.7 yuan per ton, unchanged since 2004, following an increase of 0.8 yuan per ton for household water, official figures showed.

Wang Hao, director of the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, feels water prices in the capital should be at least 11.42 yuan per ton.

Water pricing reform in Beijing is under review and a public forum on any price hike will take place this year, the Beijing municipal commission of development and reform confirmed yesterday.

In 2008, there was a shortage of 40 billion tons, affecting nearly two thirds of the cities in China. About 300 million people were exposed to unsafe drinking water, according to the Ministry of Water Resources. As a result, beginning from November, China faced its worst drought since 1951, affecting 299 million mu (20 million hectares) farmland and leaving 4.42 million people short of water, according to the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters.

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Source: China Daily

Australian Farmers Trade Water

By Tanalee Smith, The Associated Press

SYDNEY, Australia – For farmer Malcolm Holm, water now is just like a new shovel or tractor – he has to buy it.

The amount of water he is allowed to take from nearby Murrumbidgee River has dwindled to nothing for the past three years because of Australia’s crippling drought. And so, except for rain he can catch and store himself, he needs to buy water for his 1,000 acres at Finley in New South Wales state, where he grows crops to feed his 600 dairy cows.

“It’s no different to buying a ton of grain or a ton of fertilizer,” Holm said. “It’s just another commodity.”

In the world’s driest inhabited continent, there is simply not enough water to go around, and households, cities, industries and agriculture all demand their share from stressed reservoirs and rivers. So Australia’s irrigation planting sector relies on a unique trading system to make the most of every drop.

What began as a localized trade within states is now an active national market that shares water along hundreds of miles of river systems used by thousands of farmers. And with the drought, the trading of water is picking up pace.

“Trading activity is certainly strengthening over previous years,” said Mark Siebentritt, operations manager of Waterfind, the nation’s largest water broker. Water is traded mostly through independent brokers who bring sellers and buyers together and who know the myriad rules in the heavily regulated market. “During drought we’re seeing a lot of water moving around.”

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Source: RedOrbit

Indiana: Water price up 75%!!

Aqua Indiana customers will begin paying 50 percent more for their water and sewer utilities next month.

The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission approved the company’s 75 percent rate increase request last month. The higher rate will be phased in, with a 50 percent spike taking effect in October and the remainder of the increase in June.

Bill Etzler, vice president and regional manager of Aqua Indiana, said customers won’t see the new rate on their bills until November, and because of billing cycles, the full effect won’t be seen until December for most customers. According to the state, the full increases will mean an extra $19 a month for the average sewer customer and an extra $14 a month for typical water customers.

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Source: Journal Gazzette

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The Water Front

We received an email from Veronica Segovia, she is the on-line media intern for Food & Water Watch, and wanted to share with us a documentary called The Water Front.  I must admit that I was shocked by what I saw just in the trailer of this documentary. I had heard of a lawsuit that the residents of a black neighborhood in Detroit had recently won that was related to water supply and discrimination, but I had no idea of the suffering these people were put through.

I encourage everybody to see this film, to blog about it, to talk about it with your friends and remember that this kind of abuse is possible not only in third world countries, but here in the US. So listen, dig deeper into the news, don’t just trust what you see on mainstream media.

Thanks Ms. Segovia for sharing this with us along with another interesting project called Take Back the Tap. You can rest assured that Nuprana.com will always support initiatives like this one.

Our focus is water conservation and we are committed to creating awareness about this issue and protecting our watersheds. Our ultimate goal is to prevent water shortages that have the potential to create situations like this, where people are abused by the ‘owners’ of their water. How can this be happening when we haven’t yet reached a real water crisis? The only explanation possible is CORRUPTION. We must make sure this kind of situation doesn’t happen again, particularly as water becomes more scarce and hence more valued.

Europe: Era of Cheap Water is Over

European Environment Minister Stavros Dimas told the conference in Zaragoza, Spain – which has a water theme – that the Continent was squandering too much of its water resources and the guiding principle now had to be: the user pays.

Clean drinking water was a vital resource and people had to realise they must pay for it in exactly the same way as they do for their petrol, heat and energy.

“In some areas of the southern Mediterranean where water is already scarce as much as 44 per cent of the supply is wasted.

“That is unsustainable and has to change,” he said at the conference on water and drought.

“Water comes at a price and it will be up to each country in the EU to take the right measures and to ensure people pay for what they use.

“If someone who lives near the sea has a swimming pool then they will have to pay more. It is only logical to tax more heavily those who can afford to have a swimming pool when they could just as easily swim in the sea.

“Similarly, if someone opens a golf course in an area where there is little water, then they must pay more.”

He said several EU countries including the UK, Germany and Spain were already suffering water shortages and the problem would be made worse by the higher temperatures and more frequent periods of drought brought by climate change.

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Source: The Telegraph

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China’s water prices ticking up

The Ministry of Water Resources of the People’s Republic of China has announced plans to raise the price of water sometime this year.

That announcement triggered a market reaction in which the price of water resources and utilities companies was driven up by some eight to ten percent in an otherwise down market. And the movement in water underlines the deep challenges ahead for China as it builds out on its infrastructure and adopts water technologies.

Companies which reported gains from the announcement included Wuhan Sanzhen Industrial Holding Co. and Jiangxi Hongcheng Waterworks Co., hinting at big investment opportunities ahead for water technology and infrastructure in China.

According to the Research on Sustainable Utilization of China Urban Water Resources, China’s total investment in sewage treatment industry is expected to reach CNY200 billion in the period 2008-2010, indicating China’s sewage treatment industry with huge market potential will be able to have a rapid and sustainable development.

Last week the Shantou municipal government in Guangdong, China said it will invest 920 million RMB (134.70 million USD) to build a new sewage treatment plant that will process 0.12 million tons of waste once the project is completed.

“China is one of the regions of the country that’s experiencing drought, and it’s investing heavily in water infrastructure,” said Richard Stover, Chief Technology Officer for Energy Recovery, a provider of ultra-high efficiency desalination technology that recently went public. “We identify China as one of our largest markets,” he told the Cleantech Group.

To place the water problem in context, one has to understand the inequity of water resources in China. Today, China has 20 percent of the world’s population but only 7 percent of the water supply, according to Summit Global Management Inc, a consulting company.

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Source: Clean Tech

For more information on water conservation, visit our LEARN section

German water is most expensive on the planet

British gardeners infuriated by hosepipe bans despite seemingly year-round rain can take some comfort, after a new survey revealed the situation is worse in Germany.

Germans pay more for their water than anybody else on the planet according to the study. At £1.50 per 1000 litres, prices are four times as much as in America, and twice as much as in parched Australia. Britons on average pay £1.18 for the same amount, a little less than the Belgians.

As the Berlin summer was interrupted by yet more showers on Monday, German water users reacted to the news with grumbles familiar the length and breadth of the UK.

“We have masses of water,” wrote one reader to Die Welt newspaper. “It’s just that the water companies let everything leak into the rivers. Germans are being ripped off because our politicians are useless. Everything has been run wrong for 20 years.” The survey was produced by energy consultants NUS, which monitors electricity, gas, oil and water prices every quarter.

Senior energy analyst at NUS, Bruce Blazey, said that British customers still have a lot to complain about.

“In the UK it seems to be constantly raining and yet the reservoirs seem to dry out so quickly,” he said. “You have towns flooded the whole time and yet hosepipe bans are in force.

“There’s just not enough being spent on infrastructure, and the pipelines are just really bad. Thames Water is dreadful. They blame it on the wartime damage – that nothing’s been really properly repaired since the 1940s.”

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Source: The Telegraph

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Water Will Become the Oil of the 21st Century

Goldman Sacks, an American Investment Bank, has estimated that global water consumption is doubling every twenty years and has drawn the conclusion that its current rate of consumption is not sustainable.

Haven’t we heard this mantra with respect to oil supply and reserves? Another interesting factor that comes into play is that there is no substitute for water compared to commodities such as oil of which there are alternative sources of energy such as natural gas, coal, and wind power to name a few.

Climate change is also playing havoc with supplies of fresh water supply and its availability in very complex ways that often lead to droughts as witnessed in countries such as Australia and sub Sahara Africa.

Supplies of water, the clean variety that is easily accessible to the majority of the population, is starting to see strain on the supply side due to growing global population and an emerging more financially equipped middle class in Asian countries. These people want the benefits that people in the west have enjoyed for years by way of a water intensive lifestyle.

Here in North America water is cheap by world standards and almost an entitlement. Industrialization in poorer countries is contaminating rivers and other water reserves because they don’t employ the same safety protocol that we follow here again in North America. Subsides on biofuel production have increased the harvest of water intensive crops that are presently being used for energy and food supplies.

Add to this the use of heavy subsides for water in most parts of the world, often means water is squandered because cost isn’t an issue.

Water is an essential ingredient in many products we find in our grocery stores. Analyst’s at JPMorgan, a leading U.S. investment bank, have inferred that Nestle, Unilever, Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch and Danone consume 575 billion litres of water per year, enough to satisfy the daily water needs for every human on this planet. This is a starling statistic that I’m sure will have to be addressed sometime in the 21st century.

Although agriculture uses the lion’s share of the world’s fresh water supply, many other products and/or services depend on water for their very existence. An example is energy production. Each year 40 per cent of freshwater drain from lakes and aquifers in North America is used to cool power plants.

Separating one litre of oil from the tar sands, a costly alternative fuel made viable by high crude prices, requires an astounding five litres of water to extract.

In Silicon Valley in California, chip making for computers is thought to account for 25 per cent of the water consumption in that region. Nestle, the chocolate conglomerate based out of Switzerland, has stated that is takes four litres of water to make one litre of product on balance in all of their factories worldwide. It takes 3,000 litres of water to grow the agricultural produce that goes into it.

Cutting consumption of water like oil may be the only alternatives we have that makes business sense. Using less water reduces spending on water acquisition, treatment, and on the cleanup of waste water. Water conservation and re use options in the longer term may be the worlds only alternative. We may have to look at countries such as Australia who are used to draughts and the consequences for best practices as they have lived with water shortages it seems for a lifetime.

Water will, at the present rate of consumption, become the oil of the 21st century.

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Source: New Brunswick Business Journal

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In GA: Water bills headed up?

The City of Swainsboro, along with municipalities state-wide, is being directed by the Georgia Environmental Protection Division to file a water conservation plan as part of its permit approval process. This plan requires revisions in the City’s current fee structure for water usage. Also, the EPD is requiring the enactment and implementation of a “water conservation” rate. The new plan encourages conservation by establishing a new chart for water bills based on ascending levels of consumption.

“Obviously, this new plan is meant to reward people who conserve water and to penalize those who don’t,” commented Mayor Charles Schwabe. “It is certainly not our desire to change water rates, but this new ruling by EPD has required it, and we have no choice but to abide by their regulations. The actual increases will be very small and, in many cases, you will see no change at all. But the bottom line is that water conservation is becoming more and more of a critical issue everywhere in this country, and these changes are going to affect us all.”

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Source: My Swainsboro News

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Cambria water protest stops second rate rise

CAMBRIA, CA-Cambrians will pay 12 percent more for water and sewage-treatment service through June, but services district directors didn’t approve the rest of a proposed increase.

A ratepayers’ protest against the package failed by a margin of less than 2 percent, according to Cambria Community Services District records, so directors certified the results of the count. But two of the four board members at a meeting last week said they wouldn’t approve a second rate increase to take effect July 1, 2009, because such a significant number of Cambria residents and property owners had officially objected.

It was the second rate-increase protest launched by Cambria citizens within a year. The first one succeeded.

Cambria has been under a virtual building moratorium since November 2001, when the district declared a water-shortage emergency.

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Source: San Luis Obispo

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