South East Water Corporation (VIC) is seeking tenders to undertake a feasibility study into rainwater micro trading.
Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) is increasingly being incorporated in the design of new growth areas and significant redevelopments in Australia. South East Water is involved in this process for the redevelopment of Fishermans Bend, one of the largest redevelopments in Australia including 80,000 residents in new high rise apartments and townhouses and 60,000 jobs.
Buildings in this area will be required to install both rainwater tanks for stormwater control and will also be supplied with recycled water from a sewer mining plant operated by South East Water.
This situation creates a potential for conflict between availability of the ‘free’ rainwater from the resident owned rainwater tank and the sewer mine water which will be charged by South East Water. One possible solution to manage this conflict is to create artificial allotments of rainwater tank volume assigned to each resident. The water contained within could potentially then be used or traded by the resident with a record of these transactions used by South East Water to calculate volumes of recycled water used for billing.
South East Water wishes to further investigate and evaluate the feasibility of this idea.
Submissions to tender close 8 September 2017.
