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The next problem to hit the water industry (after widespread dumping of sewage into public water courses) is likely to be the impact of a lack of investment & maintenance on plans to expand housing building;
in many locations it now seems there is insufficient capacity for new housing developments, and what capacity there is, is likely to also be wanted by new data centres.
The UK is about to find its water politics even more fraught than it already is.
@ChrisMayLA6 datacentres will be given priority as their environmental impact is not important apparently even though their impact may actually create water and power shortages to the people. So the people's bills go up, governement tax breaks go up, so "income" taxes for people go up and the World suffers.
@ChrisMayLA6 this is v true even in wet western Scotland, although the problem is more waste water infrastructure than actual supply. ☹️ I think that here planners are not allowed to consider water supply/waste issues in planning applications. These are (supposed to be) handled later, and separately by Scottish Water. But once the planning has been agreed, the water tend to get done in a very bitty way for each application, rather than building good shareable sustainable capacity...
Yes, the fragmented thinking about water will increasingly be a major problem
I won't be too specific but I know someone who is involved with infrastructure as part of their job and have been dealing with a housing project thats need pipes built for capacity to their new housing scheme. There is also a potential future expansion on the books but not confirmed.
The new pipes are gonna to cause major upheaval in an urban centre for an extended period but they don't want to include future extension as part of the capacity cos money now.
aha, intersting...
They are gonna have to dig up some major roads so they can connect the new scheme to the mains but don't want to include big enough pipes (lay mans explanation I was given) to allows for increased capacity when they inevitably build more houses. So major disruption in the medium term to do the initial work and they may need to be back within a decade digging it up again to allow for more homes to be served.
(and as aside; yet more pot holes & rubbish road surfaces)
@ChrisMayLA6 It might finally be time for a bicentennial update to ideas about water use.
Obviously data centres are awful, but so is using drinking water to flush the toilet and water the garden, so is combining surface water and sewage in the sewers, and then complaining about too much volume at the waterworks.
Win-win if it brings bills down for less fresh water use and less sewage use.
Yes good point; better use of 'grey water' would certainly be sensible....
@ChrisMayLA6 There’s also the Victorian mindset of big centralised services that don’t scale well to a distributed population when rain falls everywhere. (cf renewables)
(Not to mention the modern mindset of its-all-too-expensive-and-difficult)
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