Warragamba Dam in decline but private plant may not be fully operational for another year

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

A multimillion dollar desalination plant built to address water shortages in Sydney a decade ago may not be fully operational until next August.

As drought continues to grip New South Wales, Sydney’s dam levels are falling at such a rapid rate that the city’s only desalination plant could be needed for the first time since 2012.

Sydney’s total water storage fell to 65% this week, down about a quarter since last year. Warragamba Dam, the city’s largest water source, is at 68.3%. Twelve months ago it was at 90.7% capacity.

If reservoir levels decline to 60% it would trigger the start of supplementary water supplies being added from the city’s desalination plant at Kurnell. But authorities concede the privately run desalination plant won’t be ready to produce drinking water for several months.

Two weeks ago the NSW utilities minister, Don Harwin, told the state’s parliament the Kurnell plant would be ready for use by December. He said there would be “no difficulty commissioning the plant to ramp it up to full production when testing is complete in December”.

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Guardian Australia has contacted Harwin’s office for comment.

At the current rate of decline (the city’s overall dam levels fell by 0.6% in the last week) water authorities concede the 60% mark would be reached some time in November.

But after December the plant won’t begin producing any drinking water for at least three months. It would then take between six and eight months – as far away as next August – before it was operating at its full capacity.

The privately leased plant was commissioned by the former Labor government during the so-called “millennium drought” last decade, which saw Sydney’s dam levels fall to 34%.

It was essentially placed in hibernation after 2012, and faced calls for its closure after it continued to cost hundreds of millions of dollars in maintenance fees.

Until now Sydney has been unaffected by the prolonged drought affecting the rest of the state. But the long dry spell has meant that the level of water coming into the catchment areas is now critically low.

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And despite recent rainfalls, there’s no sign that the dry spell is likely to break.

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The Bureau of Meteorology’s climate outlook for September and October predicts conditions will be “drier than average for most of northern, eastern and southern Australia” leading to “intensification of the existing drought conditions across parts of eastern Australia”.

At the same time the bureau’s modelling is now predicting a possible El Niño event by the end of spring, making the prospect of drought-breaking rain increasingly unlikely.

And the dry conditions are not confined to NSW. Drought has been declared in most of the Gippsland area in Victoria due to a one-in-20-year rainfall shortage.

Earlier in August a Victorian dairy farmer, Dennis Reynolds, posted a video on social media labelling the southern dry spell a “green drought” and calling for greater focus on the plight of producers outside of NSW.

“We are calling it the green drought, as you can see it’s green, but we are bloody short,” he says in the video.

“We are struggling here, we need to put some attention on this.”