As the water supply in some regions reaches alarmingly low levels, the authorities are set to institute phase-one water rationing in Hsinchu County, Taoyuan and New Taipei City’s Linkou (林口), Banciao (板橋) and Sinjhuang (新莊) districts this week.
The initial measure of cutting nighttime water pressure will not have any great impact and its main purpose is to remind people to use water sparingly.
Nonetheless, the fact that Taiwan must often impose phased water rationing despite having abundant annual rainfall shows that not enough has been done to manage the use of our water resources.
Taiwan’s water resources are unevenly distributed and our forebears realized long ago that they needed to build reservoirs to store rainwater for use in dry periods. However, Taiwan’s terrain is such that its reservoirs do not hold enough water and geological factors also cause the big problem of reservoir silting.
Based on figures published in 2014 for 96 reservoirs nationwide, the reservoirs’ total capacity is only about 1.876 billion cubic meters, but they have to supply about 7.1 billion cubic meters of water, which is about four times their total volume. Consequently, low rainfall for three months in a row is all it takes to create a drought situation.
The authorities make great efforts to manage water supply and consumption. However, it all depends on the weather, as we wait for typhoon downpours to relieve droughts.
If we do not want to build any more storage facilities, other ways of preventing drought include seawater desalination and wastewater reclamation.
The enactment of the Reclaimed Water Resources Development Act (再生水資源發展條例) in December 2015 was a milestone in Taiwan’s water resource development.
There are currently 54 urban wastewater treatment plants in Taiwan, which treat an average of 3 million tonnes of water each day.
However, in most cases, the idea of using reclaimed water was not taken into account when they were built. Consequently, they are only capable of preliminary treatment and their effluent water is only clean enough to release into rivers or the sea.
Most of them also have no room for expansion, so Taiwan’s total reclamation volume is only about 25,000 tonnes.
A plan to build six new water reclamation plants over the next few years will require NT$15 billion (US$489.4 million) of government investment. It will also need the Construction and Planning Agency to cooperate by installing connecting pipes to supply the reclaimed water to factories in coastal industrial zones. Consequently, it will not be possible to use reclaimed water for drought relief in the near future.
There are already many desalination plants operating on the outlying islands that do not get much rainfall. It costs between NT$50 and NT$60 or more to produce 1m3 of desalinated water, and although higher water output involves lower unit costs, it would still not be efficient to use desalination for national drought relief.
At the initial stage it can only be worthwhile for big technological and industrial parks that risk losing a lot of money if water supplies are suspended.
Both options also require extra energy. President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) government is determined to scrap nuclear power and is striving to develop “green” energy, but at this stage it is not clear whether it can cover the energy deficit.
Premier Lin Chuan (林全) said that there is nowhere left to build new reservoirs. If that is true, and the authorities are not willing to build other storage facilities, these other methods will have to be used instead and that will make the energy gap even wider.
Chang Yen-ming is a former deputy director of the Taichung branch of the Water Resources Agency.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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