“The bills will rightly question what value for money they have seen from the significant investment in this plant,” said Karen Gibbs, of the Consumer Council for Water. Industry insiders say Thames Water took a gamble by placing the facility in an estuary, where it hoped to reduce operating costs because seawater, mixed with fresh water from the Thames, would be less salty and therefore less difficult to process. But the company failed to calculate that the water would be at different salinity levels at different times of the day, making the plant unreliable for producing a steady supply of drinking water. Even when the plant is up and running, it will produce less drinking water than Thames originally predicted. The plant was originally intended to produce around 150 million liters of water a day – enough for 900,000 Londoners – but was forced to revise the estimate by a third earlier this year. “This adjustment was made based on experience and to avoid creating unrealistic expectations about the output that could be achieved over an extended period,” a Thames Water spokesman said. The impetus for the east London plant was the 2012 London Olympics, which raised concerns that an influx of people during the hot summer months could be devastating to the city’s water supplies. But the original plans proposed in 2004 were blocked by Ken Livingstone, then the Labor mayor of London, who argued the plant was unsustainable and unnecessary – despite the city being in one of the most water-stressed areas of the country. When Boris Johnson became mayor in 2008, the plant was given the green light – with construction completed two years later. Thames Water originally planned four more, but there is little sign of plans for a new plant. It’s an experience recently repeated in Hampshire, where Southern Water was forced to abandon plans for a desalination plant last year. The area will be the first in the UK to come under a tire ban, which starts on Friday. The plant had been opposed by green groups, environmentalist Chris Packham and Julian Lewis, the local Labor MP.
