The Governing Council has authorized this Tuesday the multi-year expenditure of 11,931,300 euros to finance eight desalination plants that the Canarian Executive will supply to the Island Water Councils of the islands to increase water resources for agricultural irrigation. These facilities, which the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Food Sovereignty has commissioned from the Technological Institute of the Canary Islands (ITC), are joined by two other stations that will be financed through a subsidy of 1.5 million euros from said department.
Thus, in total there will be ten new infrastructures available, which will have a desalination capacity of 22,600 cubic meters per day, which translates into about 8.24 million m3 per year. This action aims to alleviate the problems of water supply for agriculture derived from the drought as a result of the deficit of rainfall and thermal anomalies of recent years, especially in recent months, a situation to which is added the deficiencies in supply networks and obsolescence of some large production infrastructures and that has led to the declaration of water emergency by some island corporations and the taking of restrictive measures in some municipalities.
The scarcity of water leads to the decrease in crop yields and affects their quality and quantity of production and causes the desertification of arable land, which hinders food production and the increase in production costs and, consequently, results in the decrease in the profitability of agricultural holdings.
Therefore, the provision of water resources for the primary sector was one of the demands of agricultural organizations in the context of the field mobilizations that took place in various European countries at the beginning of the year. In this sense, despite being a competence of the Island Councils, the Canarian Executive committed to the representatives of these groups to collaborate in the search for solutions given the impact of this situation for farmers and ranchers of the islands and their commitment to the producers of the archipelago.
The desalination plants, which are financed by the Rural Development Program (RDP) through FEADER funds, will be delivered to the Island Water Councils (responsible for their management) and will be installed in the locations proposed by them in La Palma, La Gomera, Fuerteventura, Lanzarote, El Hierro, Tenerife and Gran Canaria. The capital cities and the island of El Hierro will host two infrastructures each. All facilities will have a desalination capacity of 2,500 cubic meters per day except for the two in El Hierro with 1,300 m3/d each.
These are seawater reverse osmosis plants, easy to transport, and whose design corresponds to the ITC, a reference in R&D&I in the field of desalination. They have been developed within the framework of the "DESALRO 2.0" project and are suitable to cover an emergency situation with the lowest possible energy consumption of the market. At a scale of 2,500 m3/d they manage to reach 1.86 kWh/m3 compared to commercial developments that are located at 2.35 kWh/m3, and, in addition, the water obtained is suitable for irrigation with an amount of boron less than 1 mg/l.
