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Influx of submissions for Cape Town water desalination tender

The City of Cape Town has been inundated with proposals for its tenders to transform its water systems in order to survive the current drought situation.

The city said in just a week, more than 1 600 interested parties downloaded the tender specifications of the first of its multiple Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for procuring and commissioning, various augmentation schemes with the intention of making available up to 500 million litres per day of non-surface water.

The city has had to look at a number of innovative solutions to curb the effects of the drought, after poor rainfall and interventions to bring down usage by the public have not been promising.

The first RFP issued pertains to land-based salt water reverse osmosis desalination plants. The City will aim to issue emergency augmentation tenders approximately every two weeks, depending on whether all goes according to plan.

“The City’s technical experts scrutinised the submissions and were able to determine, with a significantly higher degree of clarity, the feasibility, potential cost and time-frames of commissioning various options from procurement to delivery. Hence, an extensive procurement plan could be developed and procurement has commenced,” said the Cape Town’s Chief Resilience Officer, Craig Kesson.

Kesson said the next eight months will be critical as the city needs to bring consumption down to 500 million litres of water, and therefore build up reserves to help the city get through as much of the summer as possible, towards winter 2018.

“On the other hand, we must introduce supply augmentation schemes. Various processes must be finalised. This includes the finalisation and issuing of approximately 20 tenders for the various required schemes over the next few weeks and months. The scale of what we are doing is unprecedented in all regards…It is envisaged that all of our emergency schemes will be implemented to some degree within the next eight months. This has been a result of months of detailed planning which has built on years of detailed planning,” he said.

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