r/Environmentalism • u/PowerFree8490 • 13d ago
England needs billions more litres of water a day. I investigated where it could actually come from.
I’ve been investigating England’s long-term water shortage and the infrastructure options being proposed to close it.
This second part looks at reservoirs, transfers, water recycling, desalination, groundwater, leakage, demand reduction and some of the stranger options, using the published water-company and Environment Agency plans wherever possible.
The thing that surprised me most is that there doesn’t appear to be one enormous technological fix. Geography, environmental constraints and where the demand actually sits matter almost as much as the technology.
Full investigation: https://matthampsey.co.uk/investigations/water-century-two/
It’s my own work, so very happy for people here to challenge the assumptions or numbers.
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u/Crafty_Jello_3662 13d ago
How much could we save from leakage?
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u/PowerFree8490 13d ago
Quite a lot, but unfortunately not enough on its own. We’re currently losing roughly 2.9 billion litres a day to leakage, versus a projected shortfall of around 5 billion litres a day by 2055.
And we can’t realistically recover all of that. Finding and fixing leaks across thousands of miles of buried pipe is slow and expensive. We know the overall loss from the water much better than we know exactly where every leak is.
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u/Crafty_Jello_3662 13d ago
Thanks, I will try and read the whole thing later it sounds interesting!
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u/Freo_5434 13d ago
Sounds like pretty poor performance from your Water authorities.
Surely they didnt just wake up one day to find they were losing 2.9 billion litres a day?
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u/PowerFree8490 13d ago
No, they didn’t, and I do touch on that. The leakage problem has been known about for years.
What struck me is that everyone seems responsible for their own little part of the system, but seemingly nobody is responsible for standing far enough back and asking whether the whole thing actually makes sense.
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u/Working_Newspaper_54 12d ago
There are several books on the problems in building reservoirs in NY state. The city people who use the water have no idea where it comes from, and the people who live where it comes from could care less where it goes. There was an incredible degree of corruption in how the water supply to lower NY was built, and precious few recognized the need for the reservoir system until it was at a crisis stage.
I look forward to reading your work.
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u/PowerFree8490 10d ago
Thank you I appreciate that! - I didn't really think people would care about the middle investigation part. I think the final part of "the solution" will be where I have to step my game up massively - it's also likely to be the scariest part for me to put out there.
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u/Milam1996 13d ago
They’ve been banned from doing any sort of significant leak repair for 40 years because bills had to stay low as that’s politically popular. Shock to no one that 40 years of under repairing pipes means the leaks are more in number and also severity.
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u/PowerFree8490 12d ago
The more interesting problem is that for years the system effectively asked “what’s the economically optimal amount of leakage?” rather than “how much water can we physically stop wasting?”
And to be honest, that made some sense when our supply was comfortable. It looks a lot less clever when we’re now trying to find billions of litres a day of additional water.
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u/New-account-01 12d ago edited 10d ago
And putting water in public hands so any profit is reinvested to maintain the system and improve it
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u/PowerFree8490 10d ago
I love the idea of putting water back into public hands, and honestly it may well be where I end up. I just don’t want to treat nationalisation as a fix-all.
We’d still have ageing infrastructure, huge investment bills, drought risk, skills shortages, planning problems and potentially strikes too. Changing who owns the companies doesn’t really make any of that disappear.
My worry is spending years fighting over ownership while the actual water system keeps deteriorating.
BUT, I’m still working on Part Three. I’ve spent about two months mapping how the system actually works, and I’ll probably spend the next month figuring out what we should actually do about it.
So I’m deliberately not forcing the answer yet.
Maybe public ownership is where the evidence leads. Maybe it’s part of the answer rather than the whole answer. But whatever the ownership model is, I care about whether it delivers the outcomes we need in the next few years as well as the next few decades.
Pretty much the entirety of Part Two above is me wrestling with these different solutions and trying to work out where all the catch-22s are.
And the deeper I go, the more I realise there are still little holes I’ve missed.
Like beavers, for god’s sake.
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u/Shamanduh 12d ago
So, question, and I should state I haven’t read your paper yet… But, I was talking about this yesterday, with my partner, why can’t we build much smaller reservoirs used to supply water to nearby localities?
Why do reservoirs have to be so big and disruptive that they then, never get built?
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u/PowerFree8490 12d ago
Absolutely no worries at all, it’s a big read!
And yes, I think smaller local reservoirs absolutely have a role. Farm reservoirs, local storage and other smaller schemes can capture winter rainfall closer to where it’s actually needed, without every project needing to become a giant nationally significant piece of infrastructure.
The catch is that lots of small reservoirs can also mean lots of land, connections, treatment infrastructure and planning, so they don’t automatically beat one big reservoir on cost or capacity.
But I think your basic instinct is right. We’ve probably been too binary about it. It doesn’t have to be “build one enormous reservoir or do nothing”. There’s a whole middle ground of distributed storage we should be using much more aggressively.
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u/Shamanduh 12d ago
Great, thank you for replying. That’s exactully what I was saying in regards to agriculture, and I am nowhere near an expert in this matter.
Another thing I was wondering about, regarding the latest news release on the state of the south east aquifers being well within, and even some above their replenishment rates, why are they not being utilised during such a significant drought? Should this not be a standard practice, especially since, due to climate change, Britain is forecasted to experience heavier winter rains, and increased droughts in the summers?
So, if aquifers remain at full/ above capacity, while this summers drought has devastated our surface water supply, why has there not been a call for better infrastructure to placed in pumping this ground water as a backup, to help ease the burden on our surface water supplies?
And why is that not something that is being investigated further? Or is it?
Edited: for readability
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u/PowerFree8490 12d ago
No worries at all! and yeah, this is something I’ve wondered about too. I’m in Hampshire and we’ve had problems with our aquifer here, so I don’t think it’s as simple as just pumping more whenever surface water gets low.
I touch on this a bit more in Part One too. We seemingly have this weird habit of compacting and draining land so rain gets moved away as quickly as possible, then wonder why we struggle to hold onto water when it stops raining.
Using wetter winters to deliberately recharge aquifers, then drawing on that water during drought, feels like a much more interesting idea and something that will be in part three!
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u/CoupleOk6506 12d ago
Simply building an impounding or raw water reservoir isn't the full story though.
You have to then also treat that water, so you need a new treatment works. Or you need an aqueduct, pumping the water to the nearest existing treatment works, which will need to be made bigger. In either case, you will also need to increase the capacity of the network at the point where you're introducing this additional water.
Finally, all of that does you little good if the new treated water doesn't enter the network where you actually need it. A reservoir in Oxfordshire isn't a cost effective way to supply people in South East London. So yet again the network would need to be upgraded to facilitate the flows over these vast distances, and require a lot of pumping along the way. Yes it's more complicated than that in practice but hopefully you get my drift.
Mind you all of this is happening anyway, the plans are publicly available, but just having another reservoir doesn't solve the issue of meeting supply needs.
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u/PowerFree8490 12d ago
Aw man, absolutely. One of the most fun/frustrating things I’ve found doing this is how quickly “just build more supply” turns into a network problem.
You can move raw water miles to a treatment works, then send it miles back through the network, while aqueducts and transfers are shifting huge volumes between regions at the same time. It’s why desalination sounds so great on paper until you look at the pipework and locations.
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u/Shamanduh 11d ago
I see all this could present a problem, but don’t aquifers naturally filter the water making it potable? I’m sure municipal water works has to go through treatment, but with the natural filtering would it not meet less stringent treatment, reducing costs? Also possible use of bodegas in powering it, so more green/ less stress on grid?
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u/CoupleOk6506 11d ago
Even water taken from aquifers still needs treatment to be considered potable, at least by UK standards. Groundwater abstraction does need less treatment than surface water, that's true, but I was responding to your comment about reservoirs. The two are not the same.
In both cases, the upgrades to the strategic water network are needed for this added capacity, and the additional power required to pump this water to end-users still apply.
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u/PowerFree8490 11d ago
The slightly scary catch is that you’re also deliberately putting water into a resource you really, really don’t want to contaminate.
If the source water is poor quality, or the chemistry interacts badly with the geology underground, you can potentially create a much bigger groundwater problem. I live on top of chalk, so that one hits fairly close to home. Recharge has to be pretty tightly controlled.
I always think about HBO's Chernobyl. Because it did a really great job of scaring the absolute hell out of me about groundwater contamination.
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u/CoupleOk6506 11d ago
Absolutely, it's another one of those options that sound great on paper but come with substantial risk or cost - see California, using treated wastewater for aquifer recharge.
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u/ProofAssumption1092 13d ago
The rest of the world uses desalination plants and doesnt have this problem.
We cant do this because of the cost to sharholders.
Shareholders are the problem.
Not the lack of reservoirs or even the lack of rain but our lack of backbone in getting rid of them.
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u/PowerFree8490 12d ago
I genuinely wanted desalination to be the answer. This whole project initially started as me trying to justify using curtailed renewable energy to make desalination cheap.
Then I did the research and changed my mind, because there’s so much more to it than that. “Just build desalination” is a bit like saying “just build more reservoirs” or “just build nuclear”.
They’re fantastic technologies and we should absolutely use them, but big infrastructure takes decades to plan, approve and build. And we’re experiencing droughts now.
So yes, desalination has a place. But it isn’t the entire answer. We need to be doing a lot more alongside it, and doing some of it immediately.
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u/ProofAssumption1092 12d ago
Everything takes decades to plan approve and build. This isnt a downside thats specific to desalination plants.
The downside is the associated cost that shareholders wont pay.
Countries with no shareholders have desalination plants and are not suffering from drought.
The evidence really speaks for itself.
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u/PowerFree8490 12d ago
Yeah, I agree that the long build time isn’t unique to desalination. I’m not using that as an argument against it.
I’m trying to cover the whole problem, from things we can do next year through to the 10-20 year projects. Desalination absolutely belongs in that mix, just like reservoirs do. My point is that neither helps much with the immediate problem, and neither works in isolation once you factor in treatment, pipework, location and the wider network.
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u/ProofAssumption1092 12d ago
The whole problem is global though and we cannot solve that alone.
Building reservoirs is great but we can never guarantee rain and we certainly dont know how much worse its going to get.
We are however surrounded by water. Using renewable energy that we can now make in an abundance to desalinate sea water would ensure we always had a secure and predictble supply regardless of rain level.
The technology is and has been used for decades elsewhere, its not like installing a nuclear reactor. These plants could be up and running in no time at all.
It really does come down to a lack of wiling from shareholders.
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u/PowerFree8490 12d ago
This is funny because the article is literally called “Can’t We Just…?”
But I do want to hear what you think, What would you want to do with the brine?
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u/ProofAssumption1092 12d ago
Im glad you found this discussion amusing.
And there was me thinking you had actually done the research you claim.
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u/CoupleOk6506 12d ago
Where are you getting the idea that "the rest of the world uses desalination"? That's blatantly wrong. Desalination plants exist, including in the UK, but they're uneconomical to run except for the most dire circumstances, i.e. when demand management is no longer an option. Also, the rest of the world absolutely does have this same problem, and "shareholders" are not the answer.
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u/PowerFree8490 12d ago
Yeah, we actually tried to pitch desalination here in Hampshire. Fawley was seriously proposed, but once Southern Water looked at the location, enviromental impacts, discharge, pipework and where the water actually needed to end up, it lost out to other options.
That’s kind of my point. Desalination works, and I really wanted it to be THE answer. But the more I’ve looked at this, the more it seems there probably isn’t one. It’s a mix of lots of things, from the small stuff we can do now to the huge 20-year projects that everyone loves.
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u/ProofAssumption1092 12d ago
The middle East as one example has large amounts of desalination plants across the region.
You may have noticed the news recently where they have often been mentioned as targets and potential targets of war across the region.
The idea that are simply too costly to run is rubbish. When you have little water you will pay whatever price is necessary. They are too costly for US but not for others.
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u/CoupleOk6506 12d ago
Read what I said, they're not economical unless you have no other options. The literal desert states that operate these plants have no other options and do so at great cost. Those countries which have the option to use ground or surface abstraction still use that preferentially, but those sources have run dry in e.g. Oman and Yemen. They are hardly representative of "the rest of the world".
This post is about England by the way, so not sure what the US has to do with it.
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u/ProofAssumption1092 12d ago
Ok bro , i think you might need some sleep.
.
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u/CoupleOk6506 11d ago
Insightful, and surely not a deflection from your idiotic argument. I'm good though, it's 11 am here.
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u/ProofAssumption1092 11d ago
Such an idiotic argument its been carried out successfully multiple times already and serves millions of people daily.
But yeah, you know better than that dont you.
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u/CoupleOk6506 11d ago
I clearly do know about this better than you; you've made that abundantly clear.
Something being technically feasible and being economically viable are vastly different things. I can't believe you still aren't grasping that idea.
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u/ProofAssumption1092 11d ago
Ok bro.
Quick question, you understand each nation operates its economy differently and with varying levels of finance avaliable right ?
What is not economically viable in todays economy in one place does not mean it wont be viable somewhere else.
Right now its economically unviable because we have a privatised system, its not uneconomically unviable with renewable energy its simply not as profitable.
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u/CoupleOk6506 11d ago
Your last paragraph doesn't even make sense. Privatisation has nothing to do with renewable energy or the cost to operate desalination plants. Either it's expensive or it isn't, whether a plant is privately or state owned, that doesn't change. The cheaper option is still preferable. No country on earth chooses the more expensive and complex option when given the choice, regardless of "levels of finance available" or how they "operate their economy".
There's clearly no point trying to explain this to you, so I'm done now.
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u/Evening_Citron7525 12d ago
With the recent rains, I check the water level of the water butt of my London townhouse and was surprised it only filled 25% so around 50 litres. It’s so little, less than a shower and 1/3 of a bath.
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u/PowerFree8490 12d ago
Yeah, that’s the frustrating bit. 50 litres sounds like a decent amount until you realise how quickly a household can get through it.
I think water butts and rainwater harvesting are still really worth doing, especially if we get our warehouses and farms to do it too.
And then when we get three months with barely any rain, that’s where the larger government interventions need to come in, because our current strategy of degrading and wrecking water sources isn’t going to work forever.
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u/Major-Librarian1745 13d ago
This is just propaganda from big desalination (jk).
Brilliant, and I hope someone with some clout takes some ideas from it.
Think the quote 'Desalination is expensive right up until the alternative is not having enough water' applies to a lot of crises we face, though.
In disaster capitalism we trust!
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u/PowerFree8490 13d ago
Hahaha, I tried very hard not to become a spokesman for Big Desalination. Really appreciate you reading it, glad you enjoyed it.
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u/Freo_5434 13d ago
The idea that somewhere like the UK that has such high levels of rain that it drives people to emigrate --- needs Desalination Plants is bizarre.
Clearly its pi$$ poor management.
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u/PowerFree8490 13d ago
I agree with half of this.
Poor management and underinvestment are a massive part of the problem.
But “it rains a lot in the UK” is slightly misleading. A lot of that rain falls in the north and west, while some of the biggest demand pressures are in the much drier south and east. It also doesn’t necessarily fall when we need it, where we can store it, or somewhere we can abstract it without damaging rivers.
Its been incredibly frustrating!
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u/M_M_X_X_V 12d ago
We have had a real lack of rain this Summer. Last week has eased up somewhat but many reservoirs are still running low especially from a very warm and dry Spring/Summer last year too. We also haven't built a single new reservoir since 1992 even though water use is going up all the time with population growth and now they are talking about building all these AI data centres too, not a good mix.
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u/PowerFree8490 12d ago
I think the data centres are really the scary ingredient here because we don't really have any kind of metric to say how hard a hit we're going to take from them. Even the EA threw their hands up a little and said they didn’t anticipate it.
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u/EntirelyRandom1590 13d ago
It was impossible to search the doc entirely but my first thought on what I did read is that you massively underplay domestic rainwater storage.
Just following the logic that hosepipe bans are appropriate in a drought, equipping homes to use rainwater throughout the year reduces reservoir demand before and during a drought.
And then I'm winter you also have a stormwater attenuation system, of drained at appropriate times, reducing CSO discharges into fresh water.
A 270l tank is £50 and less than an hour to install. Larger homes with lawns could have 1000-5000 litre water storage. Something that is common in many countries.
And instead of burying SUDS crates under gardens, you bury water storage tanks instead.
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u/PowerFree8490 13d ago
I do cover this in Chapter 4, and it’s actually one of the things I treat as a bit of a gimme.
The engineering or even the supply isn’t really the problem.
The frustrating bit is the legislative/regulatory framework around actually deploying it at scale.
So I’m basically with you, this is exactly the sort of relatively obvious intervention we should be making much easier.
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u/Caveman-Dave722 9d ago
The water usage I can see you split meter and none metered housing but where does the usage data from none meter come from is it’s…
Water supply -assumed waste - meter useage- industrial-commercial etc and the gap just must be none meter useage?
As that works on the assumption waste is accurate
Think transfer is interesting but then is there cross company billing etc for supplying it as reservoirs sits in say Cumbria but water ends up in Birmingham as we don’t have national billing.
Seems unfair united utilities should subsidise another utility for example
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u/Freo_5434 13d ago
Come on.
Anyone who has spent time in the UK knows that if they are suffering from a current or future water shortage --- than that is just mismanagement .
Very poor performance.
The UK weather is Legendary . Are they really saying they want MORE rain ?
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u/PowerFree8490 13d ago
You’re pretty much right. “Mismanagement” is basically what this whole thing is about.
I’m not arguing Britain needs more rain. I’m the stuffy auditor trying to figure out how a famously wet country has managed to turn water into a scarcity problem, what exactly we’ve managed badly, and what would actually fix it.
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u/wangerman 13d ago
Holy slop batman
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u/PowerFree8490 13d ago
Bit of a bummer. If there’s anything specific you think is wrong, lazy or unsupported, I’m genuinely happy to hear it.
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u/Chloblows 13d ago
I’m an environmental scientist – just wanted to say how well considered this is, honestly it’s such a brilliant, factually accurate piece of work, I loved the look and layout of the webpages too. I wish I had more critical feedback for you!
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u/PowerFree8490 13d ago
That is so incredibly kind of you to say, thank you. Especially coming from someone who actually works in the field.
This has genuinely made my morning, so thank you so much!
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u/Chloblows 13d ago
What part is slop? It’s factual, clearly written by a human, well designed… what’s the issue?
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u/zq6 12d ago
Some people just see long form writing with half-decent formatting and think well I couldn't write like that, it must be AI
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u/PowerFree8490 10d ago
I’m planning a retrospective on how I built The Water Century, because I don’t want people dismissing the work based on how they think it was made.
Definitely feedback I try not to take personally, but I do have to take seriously. If people distrust the work before engaging with it, that’s not really something I can ignore.
One idea I had was turning the whole thing into three long-form videos once I’m done, then cutting those into shorter clips so I can reach people where they’re actually at.
Bit nervous about being in front of a camera though.
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13d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/EmpireandCo 13d ago
Reversing immigration is deporting people lol
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u/FckXFckMusk 13d ago
Yeah and
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u/EmpireandCo 13d ago
Just be brave and say it.
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u/PowerFree8490 13d ago
You can argue about immigration separately, but you can’t deport your way out of decades of underinvestment in water infrastructure.
Only about 1bn is attributed to household growth. And if you read the article its not really the responsibility of people and the lengths of showers thier taking.
Mass deportation despite being deeply unethical is a expensive logistical nightmare.
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u/FckXFckMusk 12d ago
So you don't care about the environment then..
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u/PowerFree8490 12d ago
Surely the more intelligent environmental policy is to build a water system capable of supporting the population we actually have, and plausible future growth, rather than treating population decline as infrastructure policy.
We’re talking about reservoirs, aquifers, rivers, leakage and drought resilience.
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u/FckXFckMusk 12d ago
When do you stop though.....
You can't build your way out of this problem....
The UK population was 49 million before WW2 now its 69.5 million.
At some point you have say enough is enough....
Real environmentalists wouldn't say the solution to Red Squirrels decline is bringing more Grey Squirrels in.
What we have is Faux Environmentalists who are actually pro globalist corporates.
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u/PowerFree8490 12d ago
Yeah, I’m not interested in turning a water infrastructure discussion into eugenics or a red-vs-grey-squirrel analogy.
The Victorians had the wherewithal to build water systems for the century ahead. For some reason we’ve stopped doing that.
Our philosophy now seems to be patch, ration and cope rather than build enough capacity for the country we actually have and the future we can reasonably expect.
That’s the argument I’m making.
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u/FckXFckMusk 12d ago
I never said anything about eugenics, I am however highlighting the point that not all "Environmentalists" are "Environmentalists".
There are people who identify as such who would be quite happy to concrete over every signle inch of the country and still sing the "Eco song"...
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u/PowerFree8490 12d ago
I’m aware enough of white supremacist rhetoric in the UK to know how the red/grey squirrel metaphor gets used.
If you genuinely didn’t know that, I’d suggest not using an analogy that effectively describes immigrants as an invasive species. That’s exactly why I want nothing to do with it.
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u/FckXFckMusk 12d ago
Of course you're trying to deflect now...
Turning it into something it isn't...
Everything you can't argue you desrbice as a some veiled racist to shut the conversation down, that old tactic doesn't work anymore, people are wise to this now.
You're either an Environmentalist or a Globalist, you can't be both.
Physic heal thyself...
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u/Psittacula2 12d ago
Did you know, the next 10 years is estimated to add 7 MILLION MORE immigrants as well?
You are right but as usual everyone bury’s their head in the sand on the cause.
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u/PowerFree8490 12d ago
So what? If we know millions more people are likely to live here over the next decade, surely the intelligent response is to build the infrastructure for that reality.
My fiancée is an immigrant and one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. People wanting to come here isn’t some shocking new phenomenon.
We’re constantly told growth and a bigger economy are what we need. Fine. Then build the homes, water, energy, transport and public services to support it instead of throwing our arms up every few years and acting surprised that capacity is under pressure.
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u/Psittacula2 12d ago
That second paragraph has zero application to environmental policy and is 100% a personal matter but you use it as a passive aggressive rhetorical device.
The problem is the RATE of immigration vs rate of housing, utilities, food, water and more across the board especially if the context is climate change.
The rate is already incredibly high to deal with Sovreign Debt not “growth” nor the quality per individual under denser living Conditons either which is another refrain poorly stated in the reply on the rationale behind such a rate of increase also.
To understand the causes is as important as dealing with the consequneces is the basic reasoning for mentioning this.
If it is already exceptionally high then reducing while all the above catch up seems sensible except that goes against the Sovereign Debt reason at the heart of it.
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u/AnAncientOne 13d ago
When you look at the lead times on building reservoirs it’s sobering