Foundation,

I certainly favour a free market in water. It just seems to be difficult to devise one that works. The underlying problem is that the suppliers with the lowest marginal costs are the catchment operators, but the amount they can supply is unpredictable.

Suppose I discovered that 25% of the people in Sydney were prepared to pay a modest premium (50c / kilolitre) to have a water supply they could use as they liked. I might be tempted to build a desalinator to supply that demand.

All well and good. But what happens the Sydney catchment area gets flooded next month, filling the reservoirs? Water restrictions would be lifted. My customer base would vanish overnight, followed almost immediately by my bankruptcy.

Faced with such a risk, I would never be able to get financing for the project in the first place.

So I really need to get my customers to commit themselves for the life of the desalinator - 25 years. In practice even that is problematic, because people die, move to different cities, etc. My best thought so far is that a property owner could commit the property, so that whoever happens to be using water in it would have to pay the premium. That could be administered by the water distributor.

An alternative would be to say to the Sydney Catchment Authority that come what may, they will not be allowed to supply more water each week than they're supplying now. If that means increased 'environmental flows' than so be it. However, could any private enterprise trust the politicians to stick to that?

Sylvia.

Ludvig, I wasn't thinking about the total economic product. The problem of an aging population would exist even in a nirvana where money was unnecessary.

The reason is that any service that is to be provided to you has to be provided by someone. This is true whether it's medical care, someone to repair your roof, or maintenance of your car. If there are many people who are too old to provide these services themselves, and not enough younger people who can provide them, then people are going to have to do without, nirvana or not.

So while it's clearly not viable to allow the population to increase indefinitely, getting it to the point where it's stable has to be done with some care, and certainly cannot be achieved quickly.

Sylvia

Sylvia

I agree that population stabilisation has to be undertaken carefully.

But the important point is that it has to happen, and with some urgency

Let me say this. Put one bucket in the rain = 1 Full bucket of water.
Put 2 Buckets in the rain = 2 Full buckets of water, not 2 half full buckets.

There is plenty of water. Watch billions of litres run down the drains and out to the sea when it rains. There is the same amount of water there always was on Earth. We don't have enough buckets (dams)to cope with drought periods. Except of course in Newcastle where there is NO WATER restrictions and never have been and the dams are at least 80% full even during the supposed "drought". Newcastle is now sending water to the Central Coast and Sydney.

The rainfall is the same as Sydney and the Central Coast.

Go figure.

There is barely enough water to maintain status quo. Any plan for an increase in population must include an expansion in water catchment and storage. I see more dams as the only solution. Desalination on a large scale is far too energy demanding. It's illogical to talk about the greenhouse effect and at the same time fire up huge power plants to drive desal plants. Even environmentalists will have to concede that to dam a valley has far less environmental impact than to run more power stations.
No-one wants more power stations and dams and infringe on even more of what little is left wilderness but far too many want to bring more people into the country and have more growth. Share holders want more profit, shoppers want more and better food on the supermarket shelves. All of this requires more water.
Unfortunately, the want more society is working itself into an inescapable corner.
My logic might be way off but i'll air it anyway. Like it or not people too are part of nature and can be dealt a hefty blow by nature as we do to her. If the continent is too dry to support any increase in population and we don't want to interfere with nature any further then let's not have a population increase. Ok. If we do want more water than we have to interfere with nature, period ! It's how we interfere that's the question. Ever heard of the Bradfield scheme ? No ? Go and Google it. makes sense to anyone with sense. How about flooding Lake Ayr ? The resulting evaporation from such a huge expanse of water fresh or salt, could quite possibly cause a weather pattern resulting in the greening of much of the presently arid interior. To flood Lake Ayr would not entirely be environmentally unacceptable considering that it does flood naturally occasionally. The solution is staring at us but because of our political system ie. tunnel visioned, revenue ravishing minority groups dictating a supposed democracy, the problems will increase in pace with the demand for water

"Desalination on a large scale is far too energy demanding"

Such vague claims contribute little to the debate, and can seriously derail it.

Let's discuss things in concrete terms. Suppose we want to increase Sydney's available water by one third. Sydney's daily water consumption is running at about 1400 meglitres per day. So, one third of that is 466 megalitres per day, or 466,000 kilolitres per day. Desalination of seawater takes about 6 kilowatt hours per kilolitres, so our hypothetical desalinator would have to consume 2,800,000 kilowatt hours per day, or 116,666 kilowatt hours per hour. Of course that's just 116,666 kilowatts, or about 116 megawatts.

By commercial generation standards, that's not much. The average NSW power consumption is somewhere above 7000 megawatts. The power for the desalinator could be generated (on average) by one windfarm like this one:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20395404-643,00.html

So that's the reality. We could increase Sydney's water supply by one third without any increase in CO2 emissions by building a desalinator and a wind farm.