The Thames Gateway Water Treatment Works or Beckton Desalination Plant is a desalination plant in Beckton, London, adjacent to Beckton Sewage Treatment Works. The plant takes brackish water from the River Thames and converts it into drinkable water through a reverse osmosis process. The first of its kind in the UK, it was built for Thames Water by a consortium of Interserve, Atkins Water and Acciona Agua. It was opened by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, on 2 June 2010. It was planned to provide up to 150 million litres of drinking water each day – enough for 900,000 Londoners. Background Much of the supplied area is classed by the Environment Agency as 'seriously water stressed'. Customers in London, Swindon and Oxford see hose pipe bans during quite minor droughts. The plant is built to treat water from brackish outflows of the Tideway. Turning this into drinking water is a way to reduce such bans and postpone the risk of severe water rationing into the long term; see the Thames Water Abingdon Reservoir scheme for longer-term supply infrastructure expansion. Section 37 of the Water Act 2003 repealed Section 1 of the Metropolis Water Act 1852. This move ended the ban of the Tideway as a supply of water for drinking, being "no longer required to protect public health" per Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton and Baroness Byford. Architects Broadway Malyan designed the plan to RIBA Stage D and acted as expert witness at public enquiry. Facts and figures The plant was planned to supply 150 million litres of water a day which caters for 400,000 households or 900,000 people in the high-demand seasons when it is most-run. Its supply is pumped to north-east London in an pipe which can hold 14 million litres of water, of 1.2 metre diameter. The peak energy consumption of the plant is 17.6 MW in worst-case conditions, and the average power consumption was estimated at 14 MW, which results in an energy usage of 2.27 kWh per cubic metre of water produced. In 2022, Thames Water revised the usable output of the plant down to 100 megalitres per day, because of "unrealistic expectations" in the design. Development The total cost of the scheme including the pipeline was £250 million. The route avoided much disturbance to residents. All construction sites were environmentally screened and the surrounds returned to their original condition. Thames Water had planned to build