Past review
15/05/2012
The St George water supply scheme is located on the Balonne River near the town of St George.
The scheme has 153 bulk customers, and incorporates a channel distribution system that services 51 irrigations customers. The scheme supplies water to the town of St George and provides water to irrigators for the production of cotton, wheat, grapes, melons, peanuts and small crops.
The principal water storage is the EJ Beardmore Dam on the Balonne River, which holds up to 81,700ML. It releases water to a series of downstream weirs and supplies water to channels, which form the St George distribution systems.
About 90% of the water used in the St George irrigation area is supplied from the Thuraggi Watercourse through the Buckinbah Regulator and Buckinbah Main Channel.
The distribution system includes 112 km of channels and 99 km of drains and provides up to 50,788ML of water entitlements to distribution customers.
The QCA’s recommended irrigation prices to apply to the St George bulk water supply scheme and St George distribution system for the 2012-17 regulatory period were published in May 2012. They are described in the Executive summary for each of our Final Report which can be found below.
These recommendations were accepted by the Queensland Government, and the new price path came into effect on 1 July 2012.
This SunWater water scheme review forms part of the review that the QCA undertook in 2011-12 for the Queensland Government: the SunWater Irrigation Price Review 2012–17.
You can read more about the pricing review on our project home page. You can also view the submissions for the water schemes that we received, the consultants’ reports and issues arising from face-to-face consultation with stakeholders.
We recommended a new irrigation price path, to apply from July 2012 to June 2017 – with prices moving in a direction that better reflect costs. For the majority of schemes, our recommended prices result in increases to fixed prices and reductions in usage prices.
The irrigation revenue earned by SunWater in some schemes does not cover the cost of operating and maintaining irrigation assets. In these schemes, QCA could show the ‘cost-reflective’ price, but could only recommend prices that increased by up to $2/ML per year plus inflation.
The QCA’s recommended prices were accepted by the government.