Public-private water partnerships

Providing a tailored response

The Group is engaged in a dynamic of change designed to transform water management models:

• Reinforce local authorities’ management of contracts and promote the right to information in society
• Protect water resources
• Be a pioneer in water innovation

Through a collaborative platform, Lyonnaise des Eaux has launched a program to invent tomorrow’s water model, which draws on dialogue and collective intelligence. This resulted in the publication of a booklet of 40 extremely good ideas about water.

SUEZ ENVIRONNEMENT also offers several types of partnerships that can evolve to adapt to local customer needs. These include:

• outsourcing management agreements in the form of concessions or leasing;
• infrastructure contracts, in which the company finances, builds and operates new facilities on behalf of local authorities;
• support for service management in which the company supports government customers in highly targeted missions (management agreements, technical assistance).

Australia has recently implemented this type of contract for Perth and Melbourne. This has helped improve water management in these cities by encouraging innovation based on goals rather than means. Similarly, the water management agreement for the city of Algiers has enabled the transfer of a significant amount of knowledge. SUEZ ENVIRONNEMENT thus supports the municipal Water and Sanitation Company (SEAAL) in modernising water and sanitation services in Algiers. The added value of SUEZ ENVIRONNEMENT is not only based on its technical expertise, but also on its ability to share its skills with its customers and support them, thanks in particular to the WIKTI tool (skills transfer programme).

Innovating contractually to provide water for the people

SUEZ ENVIRONNEMENT has created a new approach, the participative public-private partnership (4P), to meet the needs of people with little access to water and for whom traditional solutions are inadequate. This is to provide a guarantee of service access with an appropriate pricing policy. The 4P model aims to incorporate a process of consultation with local participants from the tender phase onward.

The 4P approach is based on the following principles:

• The local authority makes its request as manager of the public service and in consultation with the local population.
• International institutions, such as development banks, are responsible for the portion of the financing that the local authorities and end customers cannot bear. They therefore also assume the related risks.
• The pricing structure takes into account consumers’ actual ability to pay and the need for the operator to have sufficient revenue to maintain the infrastructures.
• The Group promises to transfer its skills at prices adapted to every situation.

The model is scalable and focuses on improving service in three key areas: shared diagnostics, infrastructure development and operating tools, long-term sustainability and greater autonomy of the service.

Key figures

• The Thiess Degrémont Joint Venture was contracted in July 2009 to design and build the desalination plant located in Wonthaggi, 130 kilometres south-east of Melbourne. The plant will have a production capacity of 444,000 m³ per day, expandable to 592,000 m³ per day. An 84-kilometre underground pipeline will carry the desalinated water to Melbourne.
• 94,000 m³ of concrete and 5,600 metric tonnes of steel beams are needed to build the plant
• The project will require 6 million hours of work, carried out by more than 2,000 people