As the driest state on the driest inhabited continent, South Australia is no stranger to sustained periods of hot and dry conditions. It’s why the turn to desalination has been critical to developing a climate-independent and secure water supply.
Since the Millennium Drought, which primarily impacted southeast Australia from 2001 to 2010, South Australians have significantly reduced their per capita water usage. This permanent shift now saves more than 100 billion litres per year compared to if these water efficiencies weren’t adopted.
The importance of this change cannot be understated after Adelaide experienced its driest year since 2006 in 2024, which continued into the early months of 2025 and prompted an increase in overall water demand.
Despite these dry conditions, SA Water has acknowledged the community’s astute approach to water use, combined with the diversity and flexibility of the city’s water sources, has been critical in ensuring a continued secure supply.
Adelaide’s security of supply is fundamentally underpinned by generational investments in water infrastructure following the Millennium Drought.
Most notably, a climate-independent source of water in the form of the Adelaide Desalination Plant, located in Adelaide’s southern suburb of Lonsdale, ramped up its production in early 2025 to shore up the city’s water supply.
Since it started producing water in 2011, the Adelaide Desalination Plant has primarily operated in minimum production mode, with this operating pattern helping maintain its infrastructure and performance while keeping it ticking over in case production needs to swiftly ramp up.
The plant has already been called upon for additional water, helping drought-affected farmers around Australia through the state and Federal Government’s Water for Fodder program during 2019-20.
Under the program, farmers in the southern connected Murray-Darling Basin were able to purchase South Australian River Murray water at a discounted rate, which was made possible by the plant increasing its production to 40 gigalitres during this year to enable the release of the equivalent amount from the River Murray.
SA Water’s Senior Manager of Water Futures and Security Dr Ashley Kingsborough said this operational flexibility enabled the plant to step in when it was needed earlier this year to augment Adelaide’s water supply amid extremely dry conditions.
“We had experienced the lowest amount of water inflows to our reservoirs across the Mount Lofty Ranges for around 40 years, and their combined levels were at their lowest for more than 20 years,” Kingsborough said. “The drier and hotter it gets, the more water our customers use as well – compounding the impact of this low inflow to our reservoirs.”
At a time of such dry conditions, this is exactly what the Adelaide Desalination Plant was built for. Kingsborough said this ability to draw on this climate-independent source of water ensured its customers had a consistent water supply throughout the warmer months.
“During peak periods of demand, the plant was producing up to its total daily capacity of 300 million litres of water, helping balance our water resources and network storages,” he said. “In addition to producing more water at the plant, we also optimised our use of water from the River Murray by transporting it through our major pipelines to top up our metropolitan reservoirs.”
As Australia moves into a drying climate, desalination and other climate-independent sources will have an increasingly important role in securing water supplies.
Drinking water produced by the Adelaide Desalination Plant is pumped along an 11-kilometre pipeline to storage tanks at SA Water’s Happy Valley Water Treatment Plant, where it’s blended with treated water from the nearby reservoir.
The interconnection of SA Water’s network of pipelines and pump stations provides the ability to supply drinking water produced at the Adelaide facility to homes and businesses from Aldinga in the city’s southern suburbs right up to Elizabeth in the north.
The Adelaide Desalination Plant has supplied more than 230 billion litres of drinking water to homes and businesses across Adelaide since it was first switched on in 2011.
For more information, visit sawater.com.au
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