One of South Africa’s top tourist attractions – the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town – will soon be able to take its water supply off grid with a new ZAR184 million water desalination plant.

The plant, which will provide from 3.5 million to 5 million litres of water a day, will start operating in the first half of 2024, reports MoneyWeb. It is being built near the former site of City of Cape Town’s emergency plant built to supply water during the 2018 water crisis.

‘It’s a reverse osmosis system and, if it is operating at full capacity, it would effectively take all the Waterfront developments off grid,’ CEO David Green says of the new plant.

‘It’s part of a strategy that gives resilience to the operations, whether they be tourist or commercial operations,’ he says. In addition, the precinct has a 20 MW power supply plant to counteract power cuts by the national electricity utility.

12 December 2023
Image: Freepik