It's not very useful now but they'll be very glad they built it by the next drought! Buying an umbrella seems like a waste of money in summer but you're pleased you have it in winter...
That's absolutely right! Funnily, there's a thread across cities that installed desalination as a reaction to a drought: it often then ends up being unused for a while. But at some point down the line, you're happy to have it. If you look at the numbers for Melbourne, that point down the line was probably 2020, as three years in a row, they really used the plant. (The only thing that makes a "useless" year funny/painful in Melbourne in the end is the fixed 1.8 million Australian dollars fee they have to pay to the operating consortium.) Now, one similar story I have on my to-do list to share one day on this channel is one of Santa Barbara's desalination plants. Same beginning as Melbourne: they suffer a drought and then build a desalination plant that ends up being unused for a while. But in Santa Barbara, there's a second layer of irony. As they were not using the desalination plant, they... decommissioned it and connected the city to California's irrigation network. But, when the next drought hit, they found out their water allocation wasn't guaranteed (as they were the latest comer on the water lifeline), so they... re-built their desalination plant. Not from scratch, as pieces were still existing, but that's "funny" from an outsider's perspective. I took a zillion shortcuts to summarize it here, but I might tell the long-form version of that at some point here, so here's your spoiler 😅
@@AntoineWalterDWW No worries, you get into it, or have a way to move trough vids to specific topics. I see it on some vids now and then, quite helpful.
