Entries by Site Admin

Advice on Water Sector Reform, New Zealand

The New Zealand government is proposing to reform the water sector into a small set of regional public corporations. Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ), representing the national interests of local councils in New Zealand, engaged Castalia as a trusted economic and strategic advisor. Castalia produced three pieces of analysis for LGNZ that feed into the New Zealand government’s water sector reform process.

Webinar on financing facilities and non-revenue water performance-based contracts

Shannon Riley and Lisa Nations delivered a webinar on the topics of financing facilities and non-revenue water (NRW) performance-based contracts (PBCs). These could be two viable options to help utilities secure the resources they need to continue operations in response to the massive decrease in collections they are experiencing due to COVID-19. This webinar was […]

Frequently Asked Questions about designing a liquidity facility

Last week Castalia posted a blog about how Liquidity Facilities could be the solution to providing emergency financial support to water utilities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We received a lot of interesting comments about the relevance of this topic (for example, U.S. water utilities actively lobbying Congress to get stimulus money to compensate […]

Second update on the spreadsheet-based pandemic model for COVID-19

This is Clive Harrison‘s second update to his spreadsheet-based pandemic model. The original model was posted on this blog on April 22 and the first update was posted on May 4. The disease was spreading too quickly in my updated model. The proportion of asymptomatics is not as high as I believed the Swedish data was […]

Water utilities strapped for cash? Liquidity facilities could be the solution

Water utilities are critical for fighting COVID-19 In the absence of a vaccine or treatment for COVID-19, there is no better cure than prevention. Access to water, especially for hand-washing, (along with social distancing) is proven to be the most important method in preventing the spread of the pandemic, particularly in high density, low income […]