39 minute read
How to avoid a water crisis: lessons learned from Cape Town | panel discussion
L–R: Dr Jim Bentley, Karen Shippey, Sue Murphy, Terri Benson, Michael Wandmaker
How to avoid a water crisis: lessons learned from Cape Town
Key points:
• Cape Town’s recent water crisis illustrated how access to water is fundamental to a functioning society and economy • climate change and climate variability mean that water utilities must be constantly improving the way they plan and operate water assets, and • improvements in technology and the changing expectations of consumers are creating challenges and opportunities for water utilities.
Panellists
► Terri Benson, Managing Director, South East Water ► Sue Murphy, Chief Executive Officer, Water Corporation of Western Australia ► Karen Shippey, Chief Director: Environmental Sustainability, Department of Environmental Affairs and
Development Planning, Western Cape Government, South Africa ► Michael Wandmaker, Managing Director, Melbourne Water
Moderator:
► Dr Jim Bentley, Managing Director, Hunter Water Corporation
Pre-panel address
Karen Shippey (KS): I’m from the Western Cape Government in South Africa. I live in the city of Cape Town. Some of you may have heard of a little crisis that we had recently. It was dubbed Day Zero by the media, and we became rather globally famous for being potentially the first city to run out of water. What I’m going to talk to you about today is basically the anatomy of that drought, and some of the key factors that came into play in avoiding Day Zero.
For those of you who don’t know South Africa, we’re right at the bottom of Africa, and my province stretches to the southernmost tip of the continent. We’re right at the bottom on the west coast.
In some ways, Cape Town is like a third-world Melbourne. It is a port city, and we’ve got 4.5 million people – about 11 per cent of the total South African population. Unfortunately, we have a very high unemployment rate – about 24 per cent. We have a huge indigent population, and a Constitution that says we must provide basic services by law. Municipalities must provide water and sanitation to all citizens, whether or not they can pay for them. This creates an interesting issue for municipal financial sustainability.
So, what was the problem? Historically, we’ve depended on surface water storage and surface water supply. We had three successive years of declining rainfall – three years in a row in which we had 50 per cent of the previous year’s rainfall, year after year, after year.
Climate modelling in this area is a challenge for us. We’re the only portion of the country that has winter rainfall, so we have a Mediterranean climate. For those of you who are botanically interested, we have the smallest floristic kingdom in the world in our region – the Cape Floral Kingdom. That’s the only place in the world that it occurs.
However, we have relatively poor climatological modelling for this region. We have a huge amount of variability, and that is one of the things that played a big part in the crisis. Every year, the modellers would tell us that statistically, next year should be a better rainfall year – and then it turned out to be the worst in history.
The last time we had that kind of pattern was in the 1950s, when Cape Town had a population below one million people and had less industry. Climate change is leading to much more variability, heat and wind. This is something that is enormously challenging for the water sector.
During the 2014–2015 season, we started to see a belowaverage rainfall, and we were officially in an agricultural drought. At the beginning of 2016, the city introduced a series of water restrictions that increased in 2017.
Historically, we had only ever had four levels of restriction in the city, which worked well. We had a roughly seven- to nine-year drought cycle, and in every drought those restrictions had managed to see us through. There are six dams in the Western Cape Water Supply System: three owned by the city, and three owned by the Department of Water and Sanitation. The water is shared between five municipalities, including the metro and agricultural regions. As you can imagine, as the water got less and less, the fight between sectors over who should get the water became much more pronounced.
When it got to mid 2017, it became quite clear that we weren’t going to get the water we needed. In fact, 2017 was our worst winter rainfall on record, and we started making new levels of restrictions after that. There’s a level 5, 5B, 6 and 6B – those never existed until 2017. We had to keep coming up with new ways to encourage demand reduction. There wasn’t enough time to build infrastructure that would solve this crisis. Instead, we became the first city in the world to halve its demand in nine months, going from 1.2 billion litres per day to just under 500 million litres per day. That’s enormous behavioural change. We had to tell our users that we couldn’t build enough capacity, and that we needed a whole-of-society response.
While we could get an emergency desalination plant in that would have only produced 10 megalitres or three megalitres. A more permanent plant could perhaps produce 100 megalitres. But we needed 600 megalitres. By late 2017, after a really dry summer, we were at a target of 87 litres of water per person per day, wherever you were. It didn’t matter if you were at the office or at home – 87 litres in total. We started having all sorts of interventions to make people aware of what it was that they were doing.
By the beginning of 2018, we were at a target of 50 litres per person per day. We were in a declared national disaster. There was the very distinct possibility that we were going to run out of water. Thankfully, this year we got average rainfall, and our dams are at 70 per cent. We’ve just reduced water restrictions from level 6 to level 5B.
Day Zero was an interesting concept for us. Unlike what you see on social media, it wasn’t drummed up by a group of marketers or politicians. It was thought up by the Head of Disaster Management.
In 2016, the city started talking about how many days of water we had left in the dam. Our Head of Disaster Management asked, ‘What happens when we get to Day
Zero?’ This was such a sexy term that the media grabbed it and ran with it. Once they’d done that, we then really needed to start defining it.
Originally, it was defined as when the dams hit zero per cent. But as those of you in the water sector know, you can’t get all of the water out of a dam. The last 10 per cent is difficult – it’s basically sludge, or mud. Pumping it into the system becomes a real problem, as does treating it. Over time, Day Zero was defined as 13.5 per cent collectively across the dams serving the City of Cape Town. What that meant for city officials and to people was that at that point, as a resident, you would have to physically go and collect your daily water allowance.
Under that scenario, water in residential areas would be turned off, and you would physically collect 25 litres per person in your household and carry it back to your house. That scared people witless, and that’s when we got a lot of the demand change.
There were three important factors in the Day Zero variables: ► whether or not we’d received any rainfall ► what the water usage was that day, and ► whether or not any new augmentation had come online (and there were several million litres that were brought online during this time).
However, the problem with the date moving was that people started mistrusting it. Initially, it was, ‘We’re going to run out of water in March’. Then those variables started shifting.
People dropped their usage, so the date moved later, then when people relaxed a bit, the date moved forward, then the date moved again. That became a nightmare from a communications perspective, because people started thinking that they were being toyed with, when it was a legitimate engineering equation that had fallen into the public domain.
As a provincial government, this wasn’t the only crisis that we were looking at. The world was watching Cape Town, and you can’t truck in water for 4.5 million people. Even under emergency conditions, which the United Nations (UN) defines as 15 litres per person per day, we wouldn’t have been able to provide our citizens with sufficient water – a terrifying prospect that opens up all sorts of other issues.
Some of the smaller towns came very close to hitting zero – closer than the City of Cape Town did. One town was 21 days away from Day Zero. Nobody in the world cared about that, because it’s not a big city. Fortunately, we could truck water there. The other areas were in various states or degrees of threat, depending on what supplies they had. Simultaneous to this, we had one of our largest urban fires in the small town of Knysna. There was also an outbreak of avian flu, which really hit the farmers. Seventeen thousand families were being supported with daily food packages, and 37,000 agricultural jobs were lost. We had much more than a water crisis.
It was clear from the economic impacts that we could not afford to get to Day Zero. If that happened, Cape Town wouldn’t be able to pull back or fix itself for years. We had to do everything in our power to avoid it.
The other thing that was important for people to understand was that they needed to avoid leaping to the alternative supply without first considering demand management. Start at the beginning. Understand what you’re using, understand where you’re using it, and then gradually get to the point where you add your own additional supply if required.
Some companies even put in their own desalination plants, put down their own groundwater boreholes and essentially took themselves off the grid. That’s a very expensive operation, especially when considering that we managed to avoid Day Zero. The business case becomes completely different if you’re not facing a complete water outage.
In terms of our behavioural change and communication, there was massive input into this. We weren’t necessarily prepared for the step-up that was needed. Our call centre usually received about 300 calls a day, mainly about the dog barking next door or sewage smells coming out from the neighbour’s backyard. This escalated to 17,000 enquiries a day, many about broken pipes as the city started pressure management across 11,000 kilometres of distribution pipeline. Much of it was over 150 years old and was never designed for that kind of intervention.
It was important for government to be a lot more transparent. We really started making progress when we acknowledged that, ‘We don’t have the problem under control. Government can’t fix this. We need everybody. We need a whole-of-society response’.
For us, it was awfully close. The rain started when our dams were 16 per cent full. We were 2.5 per cent or three per cent away from our Day Zero. Unfortunately, this is a scenario that is playing out in other Mediterranean zones. We’ve seen long-lasting continuous droughts happening everywhere, and I think that’s the new normal. We need to prepare for it.
Karen Shippey
Jim Bentley (JB): There are lot of similarities between Australia and South Africa, so let’s go straight there. We’ve got four people here who run water utilities in Australia. Perhaps, Sue, we could start with you. Do you think we face a risk of water crisis like Cape Town’s? Could we be in a similar situation?
Sue Murphy (SM): In 2001, our climate started to change dramatically, and in 2004, Tim Flannery predicted that Perth would be the world’s first ghost metropolis because we would run out of water.
The governance structure of water in Western Australia is what my predecessor called the ‘one bum to kick’ model. We are a whole-of-state water utility, so we have responsibility for providing water utility services to everybody. This gives us the ability to plan more holistically, and it removes some of those discussions and fights between different agencies and different agricultural, business and residential uses.
We had always planned for seawater desalination, but it was planned in the 25 years and rolling category. We had to bring forward those plans, and we were able to run a mantra of climate-independent sources from the beginning.
But we banned the word ‘drought’. This year, we had the first average winter we’ve had since 1974. Of the 10 driest years on record, nine were in the last 12 years. Western Australia has seen climate change. We often talk about dry climate and climate change, but not about drought. That means you must change your planning and assume that there will be several years where you get no inflow into your dams. Our plan is that we can deal with that, and if we get water, we use it. That thinking pervades most of the water utilities in Australia – certainly in the capital cities.
In the Millennium Drought, we saw big investments in climate-independent sources. There was political fallout from some of those decisions. We’ve been ‘lucky’ in that we never had rain and our desalination plants have run since the day we turned them on. They now make up 50 per cent of Perth’s water supply. Recycling is another 10 per cent and groundwater provides the rest. Our dams provide between six per cent and 10 per cent. But that sort of planning is essential. I don’t think Australian cities will have a Cape Town situation, because of that strong planning and investment that has occurred.
JB: What about the Melbourne team? Michael and Terri, you both have different responsibilities in Victoria. Do you have any thoughts about how Victoria or Melbourne is placed compared to Cape Town?
Michael Wandmaker (MW): Melbourne went through our version of what Cape Town went through. It certainly wasn’t as dramatic, but we’ve learnt some lessons through that process.
In the worst of the Millennium Drought, Melbourne lost almost 20 per cent of its total water storage in one calendar year. That was very frightening for a lot of people. We got down to about 25 per cent at the back end, and we didn’t have a desalination plant or alternative sources available to us, so it was quite scary.
Karen is right – you can’t use the bottom 10–15 per cent of a dam. We had plans of how we were going to pump water from one puddle to another puddle, so we could access what was available to us – it was quite a difficult period.
Recently, a delegation came from Cape Town and we did a slide show on all the smart things we did on supply and demand management during the Millennium Drought. They listened
Terri Benson Sue Murphy
politely and then they said, ‘Well, that’s all really interesting but what we really want to talk about is the governance and the decision-making, and how to get through some of these issues that they had to struggle with in Cape Town’.
Broadly, I think we’ve solved these issues. We still have problems around how we can access and use things like stormwater and recycled water. But we found that our framework and decision-making processes are quite robust, and they allow us to make decisions in a timely and professional manner.
Terri Benson (TB): We work closely together in Melbourne, and we plan in one whole system, so it’s very similar to Western Australia. There is that sense that we shouldn’t plan for the averages, but rather plan for the extremes, which probably came out of the experience here and in Cape Town.
JB: When the Millennium Drought was going on, I was living in Auckland. We have slightly more rainfall in Auckland than you have in Perth. I was coming over for meetings with my Australian counterparts, and it was always raining in Auckland and it was never raining here. That was as much as my experience with the Millennium Drought came to.
But it would be interesting to compare, not just the water experience, but the social, economic and political experiences of that time in the drought.
KS: From our perspective, I was interested in one of the earlier panels, where they were talking about trust and who people listen to. In the sense that firefighters are the most trusted, we found that disaster management in our case was the most trusted. When you have a three-year disaster, unfortunately all the politicians want to jump in because they feel they’ve got to prove their worth and earn their salary, so they tend to get in the way. But when there’s a fire, everybody steps back and lets the firefighter do what they need to do.
We’ve found that the governance structure created quite a bit of difficulty for us. We were unable to move as fast as we’d have liked to. This is because the national government has responsibility for bulk water, and the state level doesn’t have any role other than pollution control. It really became quite a fight in terms of who was going to save everybody from the drought, as opposed to everyone pulling in the same direction. It took us getting to the stage where it was a real disaster before people started all pulling in the same direction across political parties and different sectors.
TB: I was not in the water sector when the Millennium Drought was happening. When I joined Seqwater in 2012, it was just after the 2011 floods, so that’s the irony. All the infrastructure being built in Queensland when I got there was coming off the back of floods – that’s probably typical Australia.
But I still remember the stories. There were people complaining about running around in the shower with buckets and people talking about timers in the showers. People were very aware. I think the similarity in terms of comparing to Cape Town is to not underestimate the power of the community. In Melbourne, they still talk of Target 155 – it’s still in everyone’s vernacular. People know what that means. Even though they’re starting to talk about the drought in New South Wales, there are still people in Melbourne who are putting buckets in their showers.
Total demand for Melbourne is still lower than it was in the 1980s. That has meant we’ve been able to build resilience and capacity in the water supply system just from community action. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of bringing the community with us – that supply side is important.
JB: What about the social experiences as opposed to the water or institutional experiences? What was it like for people?
MW: When we talk about supply and demand, the community really wanted to be engaged on the demand side. While it was a problem that needed to be dealt with, they felt that they were part of it and had contributed something towards reducing water consumption. Things like reducing the hosing of
concrete pathways, putting in water-saving showerheads and yelling at teenagers to not have half-hour showers; they’re still built into what we do now.
But one of the biggest problems that we had right across Melbourne occurred as we ratcheted up water restrictions. I should point out that I wasn’t a part of the water sector then either, but we certainly have a lot of history professors who tell me all the stories of what went wrong and what went right.
There was a huge impact on the morale and productivity of Victoria. We talk about simple things like brown playing fields, which meant kids couldn’t play their sports on the weekend. But it had an impact on industry, it had an impact on the whole productivity of the state itself, and that is lasting. It takes a long time to rebound, and that affects the way we manage supply today.
In Victoria, we have the desalination plant. The idea is not to leave it there as an ‘in case of emergency break glass’ option when we’re down to 20 per cent or 30 per cent. The idea is that we run it on a regular basis to maintain our storage at over 60 per cent and create a buffer so people don’t have to be concerned about those issues. It also means that industry doesn’t have to be concerned about the longterm sustainability of the state. In Victoria, we’re running the desalination right at this very moment. That’s the way we’ve worked out our strategy, so that we can maintain a long-term sustainable future for the water supply.
KS: In Cape Town, for the average person there was a lot of fear when facing that kind of critical scarcity. What I saw was almost a grief cycle–like response. People were initially very angry, and they wanted to blame somebody. They eventually then accepted that the rain didn’t fall, and the dams weren’t full, so now they had to do something about it. It’s that process of internalising what you personally can do to change things, as opposed to expecting other people to do it. Once people start joining the dots, they realised it was food security, and even the logistics of delivering food.
We started realising that we use water everywhere. For example, with the cooling systems on our data centres, if the data centre goes down because it gets too hot, banking shuts down. If banking shuts down, your economy shuts down. You start getting a knock-on effect. But nobody thinks about it, because every time you turn the tap there’s water there, until there isn’t.
Some of our university campuses and some buildings started doing ‘dry runs’. They literally turned off the taps and checked to see which systems broke, because it isn’t like electricity where you have a very clear sense of what relies on that switch. Water was in areas that people would never think about. It was a whole lifestyle that was threatened, and that was terrifying for people.
JB: When I worked in Turkey, I ran the water supply for the city of Izmit. A big earthquake hit there in 1999. We normally supplied about one million people. When the earthquake struck, our water supply was perfectly okay, but no-one was living in their houses. The logistics of getting water to a million people, day in, day out, and providing all their sanitation needs, is incredibly difficult when you’re trying to do it en masse.
Let’s look to the future. What sort of disruptions and innovations do you think could come to our sector? What do we do to either understand them or take hold of and encourage them?
SM: The disruption is going to be massive in every sector. There’s a lot of change coming that we don’t understand. I think the water sector has been protected from a lot of change because most people don’t want to deal with their own sewage, and they’re very happy for someone else to deal with it. While everybody’s very happy to have solar panels on the roof, putting your own rainwater tank in doesn’t necessarily lead to good health outcomes, and dealing with your own sewage is horrible. We’ve been protected a bit.
Digital disruption in the way that we run our networks is massive, and will help us save a lot of water. One of the big issues as we go forward is the way that digital systems will allow us to work more closely with our customers. This will make it easier for us to help our customers understand their water use and encourage behavioural change. Although the drier climate and drought issues have changed a lot of people’s personal behaviour, a lot of the long-term changes we need to make can’t be made in a drought.
In Perth and in Western Australia, we now have indirect potable water recycling for 10 per cent of our water supply. In Queensland, they did a very similar set of schemes with indirect potable water, but they were implemented without enough consultation because they’d been installed in a crisis.
The community rejected them, whereas in Western Australia, we had 10 years of discussion with the community while not in a crisis to get it up and running.
One of the big disrupters is the ability to easily and safely recycle wastewater, recycle sewage – to go from toilet to tap in a safe way. The challenge is in bringing your customers along on that journey. While we should ‘never waste a good crisis’, there are elements of change that, when not at crisis point, you can embed forever.
JB: Terri, your organisation’s known to be a leader in the industry on technology.
TB: We talk about digitising our business all the time, but probably it’s too simple to say we’re digitising. As a sector, we are at a very exciting point because there are many challenges coming out of population growth, climate change and the pace of technological change. We’ve nearly got the perfect storm for the right outcome.
There is a real problem to solve in terms of population growth and a valuable resource, and we’ve got available solutions right at the same time. Communications technology has come down in price, and sensors are also coming down in price. They’re affordable solutions.
South East Water’s digital journey started a long time ago. We tried to solve septic replacement systems, and it was too expensive to run sewer solutions to parts of the Mornington Peninsula. We started with a solution called ‘One Box®’, which was a low-pressure sewer system. The whole idea was that you could control the flow. No-one likes to talk about it, but we get to talk about it all the time. We capture the sewer in a tank at each property, and we can control all of those.
Anyone who works in energy here, and understands peak lopping, knows it’s the same. We hold sewage in that tank until we can control the flow, because it is just like energy. Everyone’s consuming it, everyone’s flushing their toilet and having their showers first thing in the morning and of an evening.
If you have to fill the pipes and you have to dig them for gravity, you need big trenches and pipes to cope with the peak. A low-pressure sewerage system allows you to have very small pipes and pumps, and we can control that, and there’s different modes of operating.
Our control unit has now found its way to a solution called ‘Tank Talk®’, which is being used in a subdivision called Aquarevo. There’s low-water-consumption housing going in there.
There is a combination of recycled water and rain tanks for that community. We’re working closely with the Department of Health and Human Services, and we’ve now got a rainwater to hot water solution going into the homes.
That’s taken two years of testing, trialling and working with the university to try new technology. With rainwater to hot water, the houses will consume about 30 per cent of what a traditional house would in terms of drinking water. That’s taking 70 per cent load off the central system. The other benefit of the rainwater tank that we hadn’t thought about when we started it is in a stormwater sense. We can now look at the weather apps and we can control those tanks.
The same control unit that we developed for our pressure sewer system is sitting in the rainwater tanks. We’re looking at the weather. If there’s a big storm front coming, we can empty the rainwater tanks before it comes, and it can flow through the storm system in an ordinary way. Then, when the storm front hits, we’ve got maximum capture of that stormwater.
When there was only 3G around, it was super expensive to have that many devices out there in the system. With recent developments, the cost of sensors and other devices is cheap. We can now overlay that in our system and change our business. I don’t think the digitisation of our business is about efficiency; rather, it’s about a different business model altogether with different revenue sources.
JB: What about you, Michael? You have responsibility for all the bulk planning in Melbourne. How is this affecting you?
MW: There is a greater level of cooperation in trying to look at these end-to-end solutions, and we’re looking at the use of technology. People tend to think of water utilities as oldfashioned, but that couldn’t be further from the truth – especially regarding our sewerage treatment and water treatment and how we transport the products around. You’ll notice that we call the products resources, not waste, and we’re looking at better utilisation of those.
We’ve added artificial intelligence into our SCADA control systems, and that will change the whole way we set up and run these organisations. But the big changes are the standard ones that you would expect. Melbourne is facing huge population growth, and there is a change of climate that we need to deal with. There are no obvious new dams in this region, so we’re going to have to be able to cope with a large increase in population with the same amount of water available to us.
One of the things that is occurring on the journey we’re on now is a healthy discussion around what we call ‘integrated water management’. We would look at these as individual resources – things such as recycled water, potable water and stormwater – we’re looking at that whole thing as one circle. There’s a great opportunity for us now with the changes in dynamics and the costs of these services.
Stormwater has been a poor cousin. We’ve put more stormwater in Port Phillip Bay than potable water that we use for the whole region. It’s a great opportunity to start to capture and re-use that – hopefully we can, as we have a long-term sustainable solution, but hopefully we can also avoid huge cost augmentations down the track.
KS: We found it very interesting that as we required people to cut back on water usage, it created a completely different financial model. We don’t have a utility – our municipalities provide the water. But for them to keep financially viable was a real challenge, because people are actively using less water.
But they’re also using decentralised processes. As much as people don’t want to deal with the sewerage, they can use rainwater and various other things. That means we’re not delivering a service, and therefore not charging for it. The municipal business case becomes very different. What we’ve just moved to is a network charge, it’s an availability charge. Whether or not you’re connected, whether you use a lot or a little, you must pay a basic amount every month, simply for living in the city. This is to ensure that the infrastructure is maintained and expanded as required. It’s a completely different model. The financial sustainability discussion for the sector needs to change, as well.
JB: Give me one thing in policy or regulation-wise that you would change either in your state in Australia or in South Africa.
SM: Politicians and policymakers should never take anything off the table. There are myriad things we can do to address a drier climate, to address population growth and to keep people well supplied with water. However, when politicians and other groups say, ‘You can’t take water from a regional area to a city,’ or, ‘We’re not going to put up with direct potable or indirect potable,’ or even, ‘We don’t like desalination,’ all of those things limit the suite of options. What we need is for all options to be on the table and debated with an understanding that they may not all make sense now, but they will at some stage.
JB: Even though we don’t have a crisis now, it sounds like we have a lot of characteristics that South Africa has from a natural point of view.
Outside of a crisis, how do we make sure we’re bringing about the change that, if we ever got into crisis, we’d wish we would have thought about?
Michael Wandmaker
MW: That’s a very large and complicated question to answer, but, simply put, we went through our near-death experience and we’ve learnt a lot of lessons – although, there’s always a risk, and we need to keep people ever-vigilant about the problems that we face. But we do have good, well-thought-out, long-term strategies in place to take advantage of all the new technologies that are coming through. Given that we do plan around a population of 10 million in Melbourne, I’m confident that we will be able to meet the challenges of population growth.
JB: In the water sector, we’re at an interesting point of longterm planning to give people security and confidence. I think it’s a challenge for us to blend those things together so we get the best of both worlds.
TB: We’ve just got to get on and do it. We need to deliver, and not worry about regulatory environment. There will be hurdles and things that will have to change. We just need to stay focused on the solutions, keep delivering all those things and adapt to rule changes as we go.
SM: Plan for the worst and deliver on what we get.
KS: For me, it’s around the partnerships. An organisation like Infrastructure Partnerships Australia is incredibly useful to make sure that the private sector, the public sector and your civil society are on board and having a conversation together. Resource scarcity is not something that affects any one sector; it affects all of us, and we must deal with it together, in partnership with each other.
JB: Is there a bigger role for the private sector in what we do?
MW: Yes.
TB: Absolutely.
JB: That was a positive response.
MW: It was mentioned before that we shouldn’t take any solutions off the table. We all use the private sector quite extensively to provide our construction activities, and in various other ways. We are all expecting the private sector to play a bigger and better role as our industry continues to grow and develop.
TB: There’s not one challenge in our business – whether it be climate pledges or alternative water sources – where
we’re not working with the private sector. We haven’t got all the answers, and I don’t think anyone has yet.
SM: No-one has a monopoly on good ideas. We need everybody working together, and the private-sector profit driver is often an earlier source of inspiration than some of the political drivers.
KS: We’re seeing a very interesting move into much more innovative non-climate-dependent water sources. Water from air has become a major discussion point in Cape Town. I’ve got one of those units in my house now, and it’s where all my family’s drinking water comes from. MW: We’re doing trials on that. Can you send us data?
KS: Absolutely. It’s really good-quality water.
Even things as unusual as rainfall enhancement. California’s using it, and South Africa did long-term pilots on it, and it’s technically feasible. We can see it paying off. Will that be the future of the water sector?
SM: We’ve done a lot of work on making it rain, but it showed that if it rains over Perth, it doesn’t rain in the Wheatbelt. That’s not good.
JB: I think our time is up, so thank you very much
Terri Benson – Managing Director, South East Water
Terri Benson was appointed Managing Director of South East Water on 29 May 2017. She has held a range of both executive and non-executive director roles in the government utility and private infrastructure sectors. She is a former CEO of Seqwater, a water wholesale utility in south-east Queensland; a former Managing Director of Essential Energy; and also a former Chair of the Energy and Water Ombudsman NSW. Prior to joining South East Water, Ms Benson was the Managing Director of Birdon, a diversified engineering and services business providing innovative solutions to the military and marine industries with operations across Australia, the United States and Europe.
Dr Jim Bentley – Managing Director, Hunter Water Corporation
Jim Bentley was appointed Managing Director of Hunter Water Corporation in July 2016. Hunter Water is a State Owned Corporation of the New South Wales Government, supplying water, wastewater and stormwater services to nearly 600,000 people in the Greater Newcastle and Lower Hunter areas. Before coming to Australia, Mr Bentley was based in New Zealand for 10 years. During this time, he held a number of roles including being the inaugural Director of the Centre for Infrastructure Research at the University of Auckland, and CEO of a boutique infrastructure services consultancy through which he led a number of major transport projects, as well as leadership development and project management programmes for a range of clients.
Sue Murphy – Chief Executive Officer, Water Corporation of Western Australia
Sue Murphy graduated as a Civil Engineer from the University of Western Australia in 1979. After winning a Clough Scholarship as an undergraduate, she joined Clough Engineering in 1980, commencing what would be a 25-year career in that organisation. Twelve years in the field as a site engineer and project manager led to corporate roles with a focus on human resources, safety and engineering design management, and her appointment in 1998 as the first woman on the board of Clough Engineering. In 2008, Ms Murphy was appointed Chief Executive Officer of the Water Corporation. She is a member of the University of Western Australia Senate, and a board member of the UWA Business School and the Water Services Association of Australia (WSAA). Ms Murphy is also a board member for the Fremantle Dockers.
In each year from 2009–2015, Ms Murphy was listed in the top 100 most influential engineers in Australia by Engineers Australia. In 2013, she was honoured with the prestigious Sir John Holland Civil Engineer of the Year Award by the board of the Civil College of Engineers Australia. Murphy was also elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Engineers Australia. In 2014, Ms Murphy was presented with the International Water Association’s Women in Water Award, and listed at number eight of the 2017 ‘Top 25 Global Water Leaders’ by Water and Wastewater International magazine. Karen Shippey – Chief Director: Environmental Sustainability, Department of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning, West Cape Government, South Africa
Karen Shippey has a Master’s Degree in Environmental and Geographical Science from the University of Cape Town, and more than 20 years of work experience in her field. Whilst her postgraduate studies focused on sustainable development, her work experience took her into the world of infrastructure development, working as an Environmental Assessment Practitioner. Ms Shippey has spent much of her career undertaking work in the water sector, especially on the Western Cape Water Supply System. This work incorporated environmental impact assessments on surface and groundwater infrastructure, as well as community and stakeholder engagement for the Western Cape Water Reconciliation Strategy Study and project oversight on the Olifants-Doorn Ecological Reserve studies, among others. She also undertook the stakeholder and impact assessment work for the Table Mountain Group Aquifer Feasibility Study, which focused on the deep hard rock aquifer below the Cape Fold Belt and underlies much of the Western Cape region. She considers one of her most unusual and interesting projects in her career, however, to be the South African Rainfall Enhancement Project’s Strategic Environmental Assessment, which considered the likely impacts of weather modification within South Africa.
Ms Shippey joined the Western Cape Government in 2011 and became Chief Director: Environmental Sustainability for the Western Cape in 2015. This role saw her providing oversight and leadership across the Provincial Climate Change, Green Economy, Sustainability, Biodiversity and Coastal Management portfolios. Between 2015 and 2018, the Western Cape experienced a severe drought and, due to her extensive knowledge of regional water supply systems and associated role-players, Ms Shippey was seconded to the Provincial Disaster Management Centre (PDMC). During 2017 and 2018, she provided technical support to the drought relief and disaster management efforts for the region. Her drought-response role focused on engaging with the economic sector and supporting, specifically, business continuity planning. Since the immediate ‘Day Zero’ crisis was averted in May 2018, Ms Shippey returned to her core focus areas, which underpin the provincial efforts to strengthen ecological infrastructure and develop resilience through improved climate change response.
Michael Wandmaker – Managing Director, Melbourne Water
Michael Wandmaker has extensive senior leadership experience across several industries, both in Australia and internationally. He was previously President of FT Services, CEO of Silcar Maintenance Services and Vice President at Siemens Canada, and held various executive positions with Tyco Services and Transfield Holdings. Prior to becoming Managing Director at Melbourne Water, Mr Wandmaker was Group President and Acting CEO of UGL Limited.
Deakin University leads new thinking on infrastructure
Industry engagement central to innovation and impact in infrastructure systems.
A multidisciplinary team at Victoria’s Deakin University is working to enhance Australia’s approach to infrastructure management and sustainability.
The Infrastructure Futures team aims to position Deakin as a leader in infrastructure systems research – delivering advanced insights, methods and tools to revolutionise decisionmaking on infrastructure systems, and to contribute to a more sustainable society.
Supported by Deakin’s Research Network Scheme, which unites Deakin expertise to tackle complex problems, the team’s researchers come from different disciplines across the university.
Carol Boyle, Professor of Infrastructure Engineering Design at Deakin, is the project leader. She says that by taking a systems approach, the team is seeking to improve infrastructure decision-making in Australia.
‘Infrastructure systems are increasingly complex and interdependent, but decision-making is often made in isolation. We need revolutionary new pathways.’
An interdisciplinary research approach is central to the initiative. ‘We are incorporating social, environmental, economic and political dimensions to understand how systems thinking can improve decision-making across infrastructure systems,’ explains Professor Boyle.
She says that the Infrastructure Futures initiative will establish an ecosystem of infrastructure capabilities at Deakin.
‘We are leveraging funding to develop a leading research program that will change how infrastructure is managed for the future. This is the beginning of long-term industry engagement and a long-term research program with invested stakeholders.’
Infrastructure Futures is attracting early industry support. With the backing of Coliban Water, Wannon Water and Barwon Water, Deakin is undertaking pilot projects to apply systems thinking to resolve complex problems. In addition, Infrastructure Futures is also working on projects with industry and local government.
As it grows, Infrastructure Futures is expected to become a hub for industry engagement with Deakin in this field, as well as a prominent research network in the Asia-Pacific on infrastructure systems.
Artist’s impression – Research, Teaching and Visualisation Centre
Innovation in renewable energy
Deakin’s infrastructure systems momentum is being boosted by a $30-million industrial-scale smart microgrid energy system, and integrated research and education platform, developed in partnership with AusNet Services through its Mondo Power advanced energy solutions group.
The initiative will be Australia’s largest campus-based microgrid system. It involves the installation of more than 23,000 solar panels at Deakin’s Geelong Waurn Ponds Campus, and is a key part of the university’s ambition to achieve carbon neutrality.
Carol Boyle, Professor of Infrastructure Engineering Design Professor Aman Maung Than Oo, Interim Head of School – School of Engineering
The Deakin/AusNet partnership will establish a 7.25-megawatt smart microgrid, including a 14.5-hectare solar energy generation farm, one megawatt hour of battery storage capacity, and an integrated research and visualisation centre in Deakin’s Centre for Advanced Design in Engineering Training (CADET). The project is expected to contribute to Deakin’s energy needs by mid 2019.
Professor Aman Maung Than Oo, Interim Head of Deakin’s School of Engineering and a research leader in the project, says microgrid data will provide unique insights into the integration of energy-management demand systems. ‘Through the microgrid, Deakin will develop an evidence-based approach to understand how best to integrate renewable energy systems into the existing energy grid. Current analysis on how best to integrate energy forms has been limited, or based on assumptions rather than data.’
Professor Oo says that microgrid data can influence government policy in energy. ‘Deakin can help to inform future policy and standards for the integration of renewable and fossil fuel energy sources in the national energy grid. This work could have a significant community impact through better integration of renewables.’
Professor Oo believes that microgrid research will aid the development of smart cities. ‘Every city would like renewables to constitute 100 per cent of their energy mix; but cities will need fossil fuels for a long time to come, so developing effective mechanisms to optimise the transmission and integration of renewable energy in existing grids is critical.’
The potential outcome is a more precise mix of renewables and fossil fuels, based on a city’s location, wind and sunshine. ‘By providing realtime data, microgrid can improve our understanding of the best energy mix for a given location and time,’ says Professor Oo. ‘Australia’s current energy grid is built for one-directional power flow; we need to understand how to optimise the system when renewables kick in from different directions.’
Professor Oo says the microgrid will feed into Deakin’s Infrastructure Futures initiative. ‘Through the Internet of Things (IoT), we can understand energy demand in different cities and rechannel energy as needed. For example, if Geelong has strong wind flow, we can capture that energy and transmit it through the grid to Bendigo, assuming it needs more energy at that given time.’
Professor Oo expects microgrid data will inform many Deakin energy systems research projects. ‘We are already looking at a number of research projects with our partner, AusNet Services. The goal is having Deakin researchers working on industry-based energy projects through the microgrid.’
He says the School of Engineering’s research approach adds to Deakin’s infrastructure systems capabilities. ‘Lots of universities are investigating different aspects of infrastructure, but we believe Deakin’s systems focus, which considers the big picture at the system level, is unique. This point of differentiation in infrastructure is attracting industry partners, researchers and students.’
Professor Oo believes that Deakin’s teaching and research strengths in infrastructure have great appeal to students.
‘The integration of renewable energies into infrastructure systems is a growth industry of tomorrow and one of the great engineering challenges,’ he says.
‘Deakin is the place for engineering students and researchers who want to contribute to Australia’s sustainable infrastructure future.’ ♦
