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GEORGE TOWN, March 22 — Penang Water Supply Corporation (PBAPP) will be submitting its proposed water tariff review along with a three-year business plan to the National Water Services Commission (SPAN) by the end of March.
PBAPP Chief Executive Officer Datuk Jaseni Maidinsa said PBAPP is required to submit the business plan for 2023 to 2025 to SPAN for approval.
“Within the business plan, there is our water tariff review application but everything inside the plan is confidential until approved,” he told reporters at a Negalitres for Schools programme here.
He said SPAN will need to look through the plan before it is reviewed by the Ministry of Environment and Water (Kasa) before it is tabled to the Cabinet for final approval.
“We are not the only ones to submit it, all states are also submitting their respective business plans to renew their water authority licence,” he said.
He said SPAN will usually take about three months to process the business plan and submit it for final approval.
Last week Jaseni had reportedly said that PBAPP will need to review the state’s water tariff to raise funds for the implementation of the Raw Water Contingency Plan 2030 projects.
The last time Penang conducted a water tariff review was in 2015 and it has also applied for a water tariff review in 2019.
Kasa issued statements in 2020 and 2021 that all water tariff reviews are to postponed due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the Malaysian economy.
Jaseni said Penang has the highest water consumption in the country and in 2021, Penang recorded use of 305 litres per capita per day (LCD).
“This is the first time Penang has breached the 300-LCD mark since PBAPP started reporting this statistic in 1999,” he said.
He said Penang also has the lowest domestic water tariff in the country which has a direct relationship with the high consumption in the state.
“The higher the water rates, the lower the domestic consumption,” he said.
He said this was why there is a need to increase the value of water, not only in monetary terms but to get consumers to value the importance of saving water.
Other than reviewing the water tariff, he said there is another way to reduce water consumption, which was to make it mandatory to install water saving devices (WSD) in new development projects from 2018.
“Now with the launch of this programme for schools, any new schools must also install water saving devices,” he said.
He said WSDs automatically reduce water consumption by 14 per cent to 87 per cent.
