The state of Victoria will decide by April whether to switch it on, sucking water from the Bass Strait through an underground tunnel into a complex of more than two dozen buildings in a seaside town south of Melbourne. At the heart of the facility is technology that can remove salt and supply as much as 150 billion liters (40 billion gallons) of water a year, or about a third of the city’s consumption.
Australia, the world’s driest inhabited continent, largely hasn’t needed more than A$8 billion of desalination plants built in response to the so-called Millennium Drought, and critics have portrayed the Victorian project as a whit...read on.
