Earlier quoted context omitted.
California farmers use 40 trillion litres of water per year. At your rate that would be roughly 80 billion dollars a year or so. California's entire agriculture sector is worth around 50 billion a year dollars. So just the cost of water would be way more than all their earnings. And then you have to pay for equipment, pay for workers etc.
I think their water privileges are not going away. After Covid and all the disruption of international trade, self-sufficiency in food production will be considered more important than before.
Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up
221–230 of 326 posts
Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up
#222Doesn't chip making a lot of water, most of it in Arizona is fed by Lake Mead? The same reservoir that is at 30% capacity, with acute water shortages and with 4 years of increased precipitation necessary for an adequate refill. We are adding a chip making facility which needs a lot of water here? This sounds like a recipe for disaster whenever there is a period of water stress which appears to be occurring in that re…
[1] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environme...
[2] https://www.reliableplant.com/Read/25055/Ultrapure-water-sem...
Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's how I know you imagine yourself to be on the winning side of this world war. Good luck with that. Not really, though
I do think we would win in the end, but even if we didn't, I'd rather go down fighting than graciously accept our new CCP overlords.
In an era when 1/2 of the Western world hates Western civilization, I'm not sure that it matters anymore.
Of course, in the long run, it's all just fodder for a history book. The further out you go, the less the details matter.
Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Water should be a basic human right. No human should ever be priced out. Whatever infrastructure is needed to bring potable water to people, the government should pay for it. The whole point of governments is to pay for basic infrastructure like this. Taxes ought to fund something other than politician corruption. Corporations on the other hand have no human rights at all. They can and should be priced out.
> The whole point of governments is to pay for basic infrastructure like this. That's a pretty steep oversimplification there. Governments usually exist to promote justice and rule-of-law, keep people safe from internal and external threats to their physical safety, and to protect individual freedoms and liberty. Paying for infrastructure is only a small part of all of that.
They essentially rob their population in order to do it. If a government isn't paying, it's corrupt.
Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't seem right. As far as I know, rivers/lakes/aquifers are pretty much the definition of fresh water.
Maricopa and Pinal counties have lots of agricultural water that either comes directly off the Colorado river via canal, or is pumped from shallow alfalfa field runoff groundwater that is too full of nitrates to be even remotely potable. We also, unlike the CA Central Valley or the Midwest who are apparently cool with depleting their resources as fast as humanly possible, are acutely aware of our groundwater supply c…
Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reverse the flow?
Assuming your pipeline or canal is gravity driven, that could be hard.
Someone above was quoting CCF/HCF (Centrum Cubic Feet, or 100ft^3 of water or 748 gallons), which is a customary way to measure water volume in many utilities, and noting ~ $6.89 per CCF I believe. I did some random googling and ran across [https://www.tucsonaz.gov/water/residential-rates-and-monthly...], which shows a connection charge of ~ $12
Which shows that the average Tucson resident seems to be paying less then $5/ccf right now - discounting connection fee- with 'high use' (~ 60 CCF, the top bracket they list), around $10/ccf.
1 ccf being 748 gallons, and each gallon weighing 8.34 lbs means you're getting 6238 lbs of water for less than $5 if you're a typical Tucson resident, and for ~ $10 if you're a high use resident.
Lifting water from ~ sea level to the 2300 ft AGL level takes energy (in a conservation of energy sense, regardless of efficiency). Specifically, approx 27,176 joules per gallon (yeah sorry) to lift in this case, or 20,327,648 joules per CCF, or in 'American' raw energy terms 5.65kwh.
Properly sized electric motors are around 90 percent efficient, with the best possible about 97%. Large centrifugal pumps, properly sized, can hit up to 93%.
Combined, that means in theory we could pump water uphill at, at best, 90% efficiency, and assuming no losses to friction in the pipes (which would be notable over the distances we're talking about, but is too complex to guesstimate here, but feel free to check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friction_loss),
So, if we pump in energy at 90% efficiency, we need 7.38 kwh of energy to get that water from sea level to Tucson - not counting cleaning or treating the water, infrastructure maintenance/piping, friction losses moving it over that distance, losses due to leaks, etc.
Tucson has cheap electricity by California Standards (my typical price per kwh is ~ $.45, there are a lot of misleading numbers out there), and though I see .12/kwh, CA says .24 and that is blatantly false. Even so, if we use that number .12, it would add $1, literally if all we were doing was taking perfectly great water and just pumping it to Tucson, with no need for pipes, or any other infrastructure.
That may not sound like much, but for a typical Tucson resident that would increase their bills by 20%. High users less as a percentage, but still over 10%.
When you add in the major infrastructure building and maintenance costs (which probably swamp the energy costs), you're looking at 50% or more increase. If you add in acquisition of drinkable water from somewhere closer than Oregon (which bringing it up and over multiple mountain ranges is going to be fun), also even more of an increase.
Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
In chip making they remove all the impurities making it PURE h20, which is in fact too pure to be just dumped back in the ground, needs to be re-mineralized before it can be dumped.
> which is in fact too pure to be just dumped back in the ground, needs to be re-mineralized before it can be dumped how so? isn't rainwater also "pure H2O"?
Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
No way, if water gets really scarce, the price will go up, and two things will happen: 1. many frivolous uses will go away - swimming pools, spray-and-pray agricultural irrigation 2. new sources will become viable - like desalination Ultimately we live on a planet replete with water, it's just uneconomical to purify most of it for use at current rates. The same is not true of microchips.
Markets aren't going to fix everything. You know what else desalination requires a lot of? Energy, which currently comes largely from nonrenewable carbon-intensive fuel sources. Can we simply spend more money to bring renewable energy sources online? It's unclear, because in addition to being pretty expensive, it raises questions of resource extraction (lithium for batteries, rare earth minerals for wind turbines) an…
Everything interacts with everything else in a way far to complex to fully understand for any one person or organization. The most we can do is pick something and try to set it, and let the other knock on effects work themselves out (which markets help with), and then when THOSE cause undesirable problems, rinse and repeat.
Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arizona is a place where, with enough investment (like the billions here) power can be extremely green and cheap, with solar. Needing a huge amount of air conditioning is not a problem when it coincides with the moment the sun is pouring huge amounts of energy into your solar array.
If you can manage to build your solar as to shade your building, your AC costs will greatly diminish as well.
Re: Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maricopa and Pinal counties have lots of agricultural water that either comes directly off the Colorado river via canal, or is pumped from shallow alfalfa field runoff groundwater that is too full of nitrates to be even remotely potable. We also, unlike the CA Central Valley or the Midwest who are apparently cool with depleting their resources as fast as humanly possible, are acutely aware of our groundwater supply c…
The midwest gets more than enough water via rain, so nobody worries about water. Farmers don't irrigate crops, they just accept lower profits in drought years. You might be thinking of the west where water is a problem.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/nation...
edit: Maybe I should have said Great Plains, which overlaps, but is not precisely the same as, the Midwest.