ABOVE-INFLATION rises in water bills will be needed to fund major plans to safeguard future supplies, the chief executive of Jersey Water has said.
The company is drawing up its new Water Resources Management Plan – a five-year strategy due to be published early next year. The previous plan warned that if no action was taken, from 2045, demand would exceed supply by 8.2 million litres a day during severe drought conditions.
The need to bolster reserves has been discussed for years, with the Island holding a supply of about 120 days’ water, compared with between one and two years’ storage for a typical water company in the UK. Guernsey has the capacity for a year’s supply.
Helier Smith, Jersey Water’s chief executive, said various options, including a major extension to the desalination plant, were being considered.
Meanwhile, he denied that there were any plans of a “merger” with the government, after such a move was mooted during a recent Scrutiny hearing.
Mr Smith said: “The government has no plans to nationalise Jersey Water. That’s fairly categoric. We provide a public service for, and on behalf of, the government, and we have done for 140 years. I would like to think that we will continue to do so.
“We have a really positive relationship with the Infrastructure Department. We’re always talking about the future and ways of working and how we could work better together.
“We have a mandate to deliver high-quality water supply, so we focus solely on that and we can go out and raise funds we need to do that. And we are very focused on our purpose in the Island and our role in community and the essential nature of the service we provide.
“Personally, I think the arm’s-length relationship we have through that majority shareholding is a really positive feature of our relationship with government.”
He said that focus should instead be on the Water Resources Management Plan, which analyses how much water the Island will need in the coming decades, taking into account population, demographics and climate change.
He said: “That’s the important piece of work which will set the direction of managing water in our Island for the future and help us address these really serious water resource issues and some important water quality issues.”
He explained that there were two ways to address water shortages in the long-term: reducing consumption and increasing the water available through desalination, reservoir storage and recycling water from the waste-water treatment plant.
He said that plans to expand desalination capacity by 50% had progressed and were ready to be delivered within the next five years following confirmation.
He added: “Longer term, we will need more water resources. That’s almost a certainty. And we will be considering additional reservoir storage and recycling options, but they all need to be weighed up in the context of the environmental impact, water-quality impact, the cost to customers and overall impact. There’s no hard and fast outcome yet.
“Building a new reservoir is incredibly challenging from a planning perspective and in Jersey, it’s even more challenging because we’re so short on space.”
The approval process for Queen’s Valley reservoir took over 20 years, and a better solution, Mr Smith said, would be to extend existing reservoir infrastructure.
Val de la Mare would be the obvious place to do this, he said.
“The water resources plan will take into account the impact on customer bills. It’s fair to say that bills will need to increase above RPI to fund the water resources management plan and additional resilience.
“The desalination plan alone costs, in current prices, about £25 million, and that’s a significant investment. But we will do everything we can to keep our bill impact as low as we can.”
Mr Smith also referred to new technologies which could manage demand by identifying and detecting leaks more quickly.
He added: “Network modelling and artificial intelligence is also an area which is growing. AI can monitor what’s happening on the network and see whether water is being used in an unusual pattern so it can pinpoint what’s going wrong and address a leak or a burst.”
He added that developments in desalination technology, including solar-powered facilities in South America, could be introduced in Jersey.
“We’ll look to bring to Jersey whatever’s right for the Island at the right time,” he said.
