The Radisson Blu Hotel in Granger Bay, Cape Town, has recently disconnected from the drinking water network. It will now source its supplies from its own desalination plant.Radisson Blu, a leading American luxury hotel brand, has an establishment in Granger Bay, a district of Cape Town in South Africa. The water used in this hotel has so far been provided by the municipality. In recent days, however, Radisson Blu has disconnected itself from the city’s drinking water network, since it now has its own seawater desalination system.

“We dug a well under the hotel to access the water source. This allows us to pump enough water for our reverse osmosis plant to keep our hotel’s fresh water tank full at all times,” says Gary Bowers, the engineer who designed the desalination unit. It is capable of supplying 7 m3 of fresh water per hour from a 100 m deep borehole.

In reality, the Radisson Blu Hotel in Granger Bay has been forced to have its own drinking water source, because despite some stabilisation in the drinking water supply in Cape Town, restrictions on the use of the precious liquid remain in place. These decisions were made during the 2018 dry season when water stopped flowing through the taps for several weeks.

The use of a desalination plant means that we can no longer operate from municipal water supplies. In this way, we are able to play our role in saving water during this period of scarcity. Our customers can be assured that they do not put pressure on the local water supply when they stay with us,” says Clinton Thom, General Manager of Radisson Blu in Granger Bay.

The hotel is not the only structure to have disconnected from the drinking water distribution network in Cape Town. In August 2018, Lucky Star, a producer of canned fish, commissioned two seawater desalination plants in Laaiplek and Amawandle Pelagic on the west coast of South Africa. The treated water is intended for fish canning plants. Both plants were built by the South African company ImproChem in partnership with Suez Water Technologies & Solutions, a subsidiary of the French group Suez. They both provide 624 m3 of fresh water per day.

Source   Jean Marie Takouleu

The first solar powered desalination plant in South Africa was officially launched on Monday the 11th February 2019 at Witsand, Hessequa Municipality, in the Western Cape.

Ambassador of France to South Africa, Christophe Farnaud, and MEC for Finance in the Western Cape, Dr Ivan Meyer, attended the event.This plant has been co-funded by the Western Cape Government through the drought relief fund, and by the French Treasury through a fund dedicated to the implementation of innovative green technologies.

In this municipality, 250km east of Cape Town, several coastal villages, including Witsand, are suffering from a structural water deficit, even outside of drought periods. Due to these critical water shortages, this area was selected for the implementation of the first solar powered desalination unit in South Africa.

The project not only constitutes a highly innovative model in terms of French-South African cooperation, but its sustainable and decentralized production of drinkable water could be replicated in a highly cost-effective manner for communities along the South African coastline, as well as inland, anywhere with sufficient brackish water available.

​The plant produces 100kl of fresh water per day powered by the solar energy only, to address the normal local water requirement. The plant offers the possibility to supply drinking water besides sunlight hours through the connection to the local electricity grid. The unit has been in full production since the 20th December. It is designed to address the December holiday peak period with a daily production capacity increased to 300kl.

The technology, OSMOSUN®, developed by the French Company Mascara Renewable Water and brought to South Africa by their local partner TWS-Turnkey Water Solutions, is the world’s first reverse osmosis desalination technology coupled with photovoltaic solar energy without batteries, designed to supply coastal or borehole-dependent communities, with drinking water at a competitive price and without CO2 emissions.

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