Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille on Sunday pledged that Cape Town “will not run out of water”, and said one of the city’s modular land-based desalination plants would produce two-million litres of water per day to be fed into the city’s water distribution network by February 2018.

“Last week I made a commitment to communicate directly with all Capetonians about the city’s work to secure alternative water sources. My message is clear: we have a plan, we will supply water, but Capetonians, your help is vital and so we need you to keep saving,” she said after visiting the site of the modular land-based desalination plant in the V&A Waterfront.

“We managed to bring consumption down to 585-million litres of collective use per day from pre-restriction consumption levels of 1.1-billion litres per day. We will not allow a well-run city to run out of water. The city is securing our water resilience through saving and bringing more alternative water sources into our network.”

One such water source was the temporary desalination plant the city was building on East Pier Road in the V&A Waterfront. An open-air parking lot opposite the heliports would be converted into a desalination plant that would produce two-million litres of water every day. The V&A Waterfront made the land available to the city at no cost.

Water would be extracted from the ocean on the harbour side of the pier, treated at the desalination plant, and clean water would be pumped into the city’s water network near the site. The location of the site made it easy for the city to provide services to the desalination plant. The city would provide electricity in November 2017 and construction would start soon after, De Lille said.

The desalination plant was in addition to the eight other modular land-based desalination plants the city was implementing – Hout Bay (four-million litres per day); Granger Bay (eight-million litres); Red Hill/Dido Valley (two-million litres); Strandfontein (seven-million litres); Monwabisi (seven-million); Harmony Park (eight-million); Cape Town Harbour (50-million litres); and the universal sites (20-million litres per day).

On Friday the city awarded the tenders for the desalination plants at Strandfontein and Monwabisi. The city was also working on groundwater abstraction at Atlantis and Silwerstroom, Cape Flats Aquifer, Cape Peninsula, and Hottentots-Holland aquifers, De Lille said.

The city had already managed to increase the production capacity of the existing Atlantis and Silwerstroom aquifer by five-million litres per day. This would increase incrementally to 25-million litres per day.

At the Zandvliet Wastewater Treatment Works, the pipeline work had already started and the yield would rise incrementally from this source to produce 10-million litres per day.

“I am continually assessing the city’s solutions to provide alternative water sources while Capetonians continue to save. We are not only building water resilience in the immediate future, but also looking ahead to the years to come and how we ensure water security beyond 2018,” De Lille said.