Water is the driving force that moves nature” (Leonardo da Vinci, XV century). Seventeen years will be celebrated next July since, in the first week of that month, but in 2005, the project to build the Júcar-Vinalopó transfer was blown up, avoiding the solution to a pending issue that Valencia has had with Alicante since 1420 (you have read correctly), when Elche demanded water from the Júcar to solve the water problems of the province. I remember as if it were yesterday what happened that week at the beginning of summer, because in just seven days the Government changed everything and for the worse. To have it executed and agreed with all the actors at 80%, by changing the water intake and, a few months later, expelling Benidorm as the recipient of the water. An infrastructure that had begun to be built in 2002, but which collapsed and today, 450 million euros of public money invested later, has become a tribute to public waste.
Let’s go back to 2005. The Government, then represented by the state company Aguas del Júcar, had organized a visit to Cortes de Pallás, the initial intake of the water, to explain the benefits of the project to farmers and mayors of the municipalities affected by the transfer. Visit, boat trip with a river route and food in Ayora, in which the then head of Aguas del Júcar, struck down months later with a hefty compensation, assured that 120 hm per year would be transferred through the pipeline to solve, definitively, the supply problems of the regions of Vinalopó, l’Alacantí and even Benidorm, while at the same time resolving what experts say is the province’s main environmental problem: the overexploitation of its aquifers. All this happened on July 2, 2005. Well. Only five days later, on July 7, San Fermín, there was a unilateral modification of the plans, the capture of Cortes de Pallás (completed after an investment of 30 million euros) was rejected to move it to the mouth of the river, in the Weir of the Marquesa (Cullera), where the flow is made up of a mixture of water laden with pesticides from intensive Valencian agriculture and salt from the seawater that enters the area.
Experts and irrigators put the cry in the sky. It was even known that the PSOE itself, the party that governed then and governs now, had dismissed that same option years ago because it was bad and expensive – raising water from Cullera to Villena costs one potosí and on top of that, at the current prices of electricity, not even I tell you -, but in Madrid, with the complicity of Valencia, they looked, as almost always, the other way. This fulfilled an assertion that Professor Antonio Gil Olcina, former Rector of the University of Alicante and national authority in everything related to water management, had made to me a few months ago: “As soon as Valencia sees that sending water to Alicante generates a problem, goodbye to the transfer».
So it was. Seventeen years later, after years of litigation, meetings and new unfulfilled promises, the Government, again with the complicity of the Consell, either due to its ineptitude or as a consequence of the internal battle that is being waged in the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Agriculture, expects to approve next spring the new Júcar Hydrological Plan, a document that could give the final blow to the Júcar-Vinalopó transfer. There will only be water if it rains and enough flow circulates through the ceding river, because all the water left over from the modernization of Valencian irrigation, all of it, will go to the conservation of the Albufera de Valencia natural park. This is how history is written and this is how we have been telling it to you, despite the fact that in 2001 it was reflected, black on white, that the surplus flow from a modernization paid for by all Valencians, including Alicante and Castellón, would be transferred to solve two capital problems of Alicante: overexploitation of aquifers and supply. A province, serve for the anecdote, in which another river is born, the Serpis, which has been “transferring” water to Valencia all its life.
What have we done wrong in Alicante to deserve so much offense? The problems with the transfers of the Tagus and Júcar, one with an uncertain future and the other blocked, compromise not only the agricultural future but also the industrial and social one, because the water from the Júcar, like that which comes from the Tagus, is not only used to maintain the garden of Europe, but to drink, build and, among other activities, to support the tourism sector. And if the attitude of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition is serious, it is no less so that of the Ministry of Agriculture, from which, far from building, the water problem is bombarded again and again and, even, it is put on the ropes even the president himself Ximo Puig, victim of friendly fire.
The regular and continuous start-up every year of the Júcar-Vinalopó transfer is one of the great pending issues of the Government with Alicante in terms of water. Changing the water intake triggered the price of water as the flow was not useful for urban consumption. From then on, and with the weight of the transfer on the shoulders of the farmers, controversies have continued over the last 17 years. The last one, when three years ago Acuamed refused to start the transfer if the farmers did not take charge of the extra cost of 200 million euros of a project that has cost up to now 450 million euros. An aberration that today almost remains as an anecdote after knowing the last movement of the Government backed by the Consell in its allegations to the Júcar plan.
The payment of the 200 million euros demanded by the Ministry for the Ecological Transition to reopen the Júcar Vinalopó transfer, without guarantee of water despite the promises of the Consell, would cause a decrease of 14.6% in agricultural production and a 13 .4% of employment. The irrigators applaud the incorporation of photovoltaic energy proposed by the vice president Theresa Rivera But has anyone stopped to think about the bubble that the boom in panels could cause in the form of an increase in the prices of nickel, cobalt… that are used to manufacture these installations? A study by the Polytechnic University of Cartagena maintains that with an investment of 62 million euros in panels to harness the sun’s energy (the return is calculated in 10 years) it would be possible to reduce operating costs by 0.17 euros/m , on an annual flow of 35 hm Wonderful, but for this you have to have water and, right now, it seems like a pipe dream. By the way, the option of bringing desalinated water to Villena is impossible from an economic point of view. In case someone thinks of raising the nonsense.
Can you imagine the Government and the Consell convincing Valencian farmers to use 100 hm of purified flow at the Pinedo plant in exchange for releasing clean water for the Vinalopó? Flow would be released even to supply the Vega Baja, which is questioned about the water from the Tagus, from the Alarcón reservoir. A step forward towards the true structuring of the territory.
In Spain, the lack of water has never been addressed with climatic criteria. It is inconceivable, for example, that the Government gives Portugal a flow of 7,000 hm every year, and up to 9,000 hm, from the Tagus, when by the Albufeira agreement it is only obliged to 2,700 hm, while the water It is so lacking in other territories of Spain, such as the always neglected province of Alicante, a land of welcome for thousands of Spaniards, and not just tourists.
www.informacion.es
Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.