Drought has a price. And the extra effort to obtain dwindling water resources will also be felt in the pocketbook. The Barcelona Metropolitan Area has begun preparations to update the water supply rate in the municipalities supplied by this entity. The matter will be debated by metropolitan groups and could be adopted at an upcoming plenary session before coming into force at the beginning of the year.
The tariff update will be the consequence of the increase in the costs of water treatment in the facilities of the public supplier company of the Generalitat Aigües Ter-Llobregat (ATL), owner of the two desalination plants (El Prat and Blanes) and the potabilizadora of Abrera (Llobregat) and Cardedeu (Ter).
These facilities are, together with the Sant Joan Despí water treatment plant, in Aigües de Barcelona, the large taps that supply the flow to the metropolitan area. “We have to update the water rate because objectively the prices of water collection related to energy, among other factors, have risen,” say sources from the Metropolitan Area.
Precisely, the public company that supplies water in high ATL plans to approve today the update of the water sales rates to the 116 clients (municipalities) in the Barcelona region, including the AMB. Subsequently, it will be communicated to the town councils.
The ATL water rate will increase by approximately 30% according to the communicated proposal, although the same sources indicated that the final impact on the bill paid by the citizen is yet to be determined. This is a matter yet to be defined, since other rates and concepts hang from the water receipt (water fee, waste treatment rate and others).
Sources from the Metropolitan Area stressed that this increase in price (30%) is apparently “misleading,” they added, since what is important is “the translation into an absolute monetary value,” which makes the figure take on another dimension. The ATL rate update costs 1 or 1.5 euros per person per month.
The increases in water costs for the Barcelona area are due to an update of the CPI, since ATL had not updated its rates since 2017. However, the key factor is the high electricity cost and the revision of electricity rates that The supplier company has had a burden that has a decisive impact on the operating costs of desalination plants, which have had to operate at full capacity continuously due to the drought.
Currently, 33% of the resources supplied in the 23 municipalities served by Aigües de Barcelona come from the El Prat desalination plant.
While the water from the Ter River that transports the artery from Cardedeu to Barcelona descends by gravity, the desalination plants involve high energy consumption.
In addition, there have been increases in personnel and operating costs, including reagents, necessary to treat scarcer water and in which purification processes must be extreme. To improve this supply, ATL has had to optimize the treatments at the Ter water treatment plant (in Cardedeu), where the installation of new active carbon filters and the construction of a new ozonation disinfection facility is planned, among other elements.
The update of the metropolitan water rate is also the result of the need to undertake various investment works in the metropolitan area until 2030, new hydraulic works infrastructure as well as “modernization and regeneration” work of the infrastructures in service. The future update of metropolitan rates must take into account the price review approaches presented by Aigües de Barcelona, which manages the service in 23 municipalities.
Besides. The metropolitan area must provide itself with new water resources to be able to comply with the agreement that requires it to reduce the collection of water from the Ter, following the pact that plans to gradually reduce the transfer of this river to Barcelona.
This issue has been present in the conversations held by the executive management of the Metropolitan Area and the Ministry of Climate Action, which have sought to reach a double consensus: on the ATL tariff and on the update of the metropolitan water tariff.
The fact that the four large political groups are part of the metropolitan government is a factor that would allow the agreement to be smoothed. The different groups of the metropolitan government (PSC, Comuns, Junts and ERC) have been informed of the intention of the PSC (majority formation that also leads the water management area), although the proposal has not yet been formulated in writing.
Spokespersons for these groups hope to know the details soon, although it cannot be ruled out that the Comuns will distance themselves or express their disagreement.
