There was a talk over FM 938 about water conservation & efforts attended by callers & PUB sr engineer..
A caller lamented that his water consumptions over past 20 years had been 20-30% below national average and yet he still pays water conservation tax.
He has been doing his part, why is he still required to pay the tax? PUB replied that he can be made special member AND when he uses less water he is already saving on his bill and tax!!!!!!!!!!!
Isn't it daylight robbery PAP style? You tax pple for not converserving water but YOU dun incentivise them for converserving water!!
Dun forget PUB is a monopoly and must play fair to consumers.
The price of water will continue to rise, there is no other way for it not to happen. Here is the reason why, from an old thread I started.
Will NEWATER and Desalination Bankrupt S'pore?
I got sick and tired of the recent PAP propaganda about the 4th Newater plant coming online and how we are now using Newater for 30% of our water needs. I did some simple checking and from what I can see, these are the numbers I arrived at.
Daily water consumption in S'pore is about 800 million gallons.
We pay 3 sen per 1,000 gallons of water from Malaysia and than resell a portion to them at 50sen per 1,000 gallon. The PAP has never indicated what the is cost to us to purify the water to this stage. I would venture a guess that we are not losing any money selling it at 50 sen. Bare in mind that many of the pumping stations, pipes, and infrastructure for this source of water has now be depreciated over the last 40 years. There is no foreseable further need for infrastructure needed under this current source. Also, it is mentioned that the Malaysian water accounts for 50% of the daily S'pore water needs. Therefore, we can assume the fixed cost of water production is fully depreciated and that the variable cost under the old water arrangements with malaysia is very small at 3 sen per 1,000 gallons.
On the other hand, brand new Newater plants must be constructed, at a cost of at least $180 million per plant. We have 4 already, need a few more. Cost for all the Newater plants is likely to exceed $1 billion. Than we need Desalination plants. What the cost is, I have no idea. I am sure it will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Even worse, desalination plants require land, more than the Newater plants. The land set aside for the Newater plants and the Desalination plants have some sort of opportunity cost. These land could be more useful or productive if a factory were to be build on them. Currently, most of the land requirements under our current water system is located in Johor. i.e. the water source, the pumping stations, pipelines, etc. Only the filtration plant is located in S'pore and that occupies but a fraction of the land that all the Newater and Desalination plants will occupy.
In addition what is the cost to produce 1000 gallons of Newater versus 1000 gallons of water under the current system. My best estimate from what I can research is $2.75-$3 Sing. That is up to RM$7. Compare this with 50 sen that we are currently producing it for. Under this assumption, Newater will cost $1.2 million a day to produce, assuming that u only need to produce enough Newater (50%) to replace the Johor supply. That's $438 million a year. The production of Newater is further dependent on energy as electricity has to be used to run the plant, and create ultraviolet radiation. It also needs much more labour to operate it than the current system. These 2 factors will go up in the future, making Newater even more expensive.
The cost of desalinated water may be even higher than Newater. The reason is that desalinated water uses an evaporative reverse osmosis process and water has to be heated to gas (water vapour). This is energy intensive, and energy accounts for 1/3 the cost of desalinated water. My best estimate from all my research is that it cost USD$0.75 to produce 1 cubic meter of water using the desalination process. Or, about USD$3.41 for 1000 gallons. this is even more costly than Newater and it will only increase in the future with the cost of energy rising. And this number does not include the cost of construction for the desalination plants.
Given all these factors, we should have renewed the water agreement. Even if the Malaysians want 100 times more (RM$3) per thousand gallon, it will still be much more cheaper than Newater or desalination. Just the over $1 billion we could have saved in infrastruction construction would have been worth it. I see this as a big failure on the part of Con you. He let his ego interfere with this important issue, and ended up in a pissing match with Madhatter. In the end, WE are the losers.
