My dad is a pathologist and whenever I talk about rainwater tanks he tells me how unsafe it is (he’s had cases of salmonella from contaminated rainwater tanks). I’m slowly working at convincing him and I’m about to write a post on the topic.

Alternatively drinking water could continue to be supplied through govt monopoly and individual rainwater collection be used for the garden, toilet flushing, washing, etc. These are also condidates for reuse of grey water within homes and businesses (black water, from toilets, could still be piped away for sewage treatment).

Think about it, use taxpayers money ( inefficiently ) to keep us paying them MORE taxes. What interest do such entities have in the best solutions, if they take away their power of monopoly…? How many rainwater tanks would $ 10 billion buy…? my guess is roughly $ 10 b worth more than the water boards would like to see, since the main flow they are interested in is a permanent one from our pockets to their coffers……

On the issue of desalination plants themselves, the saddest part is that smaller cheaper and low tech options do exist to desalinate water using mostly just solar energy, as alluded to above, one suspects that they would also be LEAST preffered by those with a vested interest in centralized monopolies.

If you dont believe solar desalination is low tech, I saw an article long ago about a Scottish engineer who built one ( …in Peru?.. ) back in the mid 1850′S, I think from memory. Now that was about 100 years ago, and it got around 2000 litres a day from a small solar evaporation system, if I recall correctly. This of course was not a multimillion dollar investment, no osmosis, no fuel imputs, no patented technology, and more to the point no water authority.

As a counterpoint to that, the Sydney agency responible for waste water “treatment” spent 500 million dollars piping shit further out to sea, yeh thanks guys, thanks a million, no make that 500 million.

Meanwhile, Australian standards for water teartment are the worst in the developed world, and a lost opportunity to make biogas, which might mean WE wouldn’t have to pay these monopolies OUR money, so they can pipe it out to sea too presumably…… sigh……

( They might be able to MAKE money on the gas, which would be cleaner energy than we have right now, and 20 times smaller greenhouse “footprint” than coal power. Methane is roughly 20 times more active as a green house gas than co2, and burning it would also replace the coal component…)

In my opinion there IS a place for solar desalination, among other good ideas, the problem remains excessive influence of vested interests on not only policy, but implementation.

Its high time both politicians and governmental employees started putting the interests of Australians ahead of their own, and stop treating us like a free money tree, me thinks.
They should be making the pie bigger, instead of trying to get a bigger slice from us the tax payers all the time.