271–280 of 326 posts
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The east coast gets hit by several hurricanes each year, some of which result in disasters and states of emergency being declared and cause billions of dollars worth of damage.
North east isn't that bad, that's mostly the south east.
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So is the problem then that you can't push enough heat into the air, so you need to evaporate water? Sounds like a nice input to a desalination plant. Does this mean you agree that Arizona is a strange choice? If they need so much water, does that mean you agree that
Absolutely it's a strange choice. From a power perspective it can make sense since solar works very well, but from a water perspective it's a very strange choice. Cheap land is also a very big factor. TSMC purchased over a thousand acres. Where else in the US can you find a thousand acres so near a populous area and so easily accessible off a major freeway like that? Tax promises and Trump trying to sway the state fo…
of course I guess there's wildfires now too, but that's not really an Arizona thing either.
of course you're not wrong about companies often being lured by the particular states that are willing to offer them massive tax breaks, in some cases even to places like Texas that do get hurricanes on an occasional basis. And that doesn't always work out well in the end like with the Texas power outages that seem to be occurring more and more frequently, there are a LOT of fabs in Dallas/etc that are having to deal with widespread power outages multiple times a year.
(you're the expert here but it seems like the generator capacity usually isn't sufficient to continue normal operation of the fab, it's more to maintain containment/purity of the feedstock and you still lose wafers that were in-process at the time? that's the impression I've gotten at least)
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Intel has built fabs in Arizona for a long time, this isn’t a new thing. They do this because of seismic stability and a lack of severe weather. Water isn’t a huge concern because they can internally recycle most of it.
vs. somewhere like Ohio? It is hard to believe moderate snowfall would override environmental externalities such as cooling costs and water use.
Sodium contamination messes up the threshold voltages of transistors.
And the Northeast uses salt everywhere for snow and ice control and removal.
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Well, it’s a market, so the corporations with cashflow stand at the front of the queue. There is no other way of organizing this in our late stage capitalist shitscape… It’s unfortunate that poor people need to starve or freeze to death to keep billionaires “alive”, but that’s what our genocidal, fellow citizens have been voting for..
Please try and actually contribute to the discussion. In reality countries without many billionaires have way more issues with water supply and heating.
We're a wealthy country, that's obvious, and while we've demonstrated the power of greed to get things done, we have done poorly at keeping it in check and harnessing it for good. We don't need to do away with billionaires or take away all corporate power but they shouldn't be making up the rules to suit themselves.
On this point of water access, it seems pretty reasonable to charge progressively, but not so progressively that it's practical for small consumers to sell their excess cheap water to large consumers.
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In this case I can't compare it to agriculture. I don't think growing food in a desert is a good idea either. The Intel site in Portland, OR uses ~2 Billion gallons of water per year. They claim they are bringing enough recycle capacity to save about half that. https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2017/08/intel_wate...
That’s not much. The average family of 4 in Arizona uses about 325,000 gallons a year. So a billion gallons is equivalent to 3,000 families, or a very small town.
I mean you can flush the toilet every minute for the whole day and only use about that much water, and that's assume the toilet fills up as fast (it doesn't).
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> nut farmers can afford to buy even very expensive water (x) doubt If they actually can pay for "very expensive water" i.e. water at the rates that residential/commercial users pay, then fair play to them. But from what I heard, they are only profitable by paying near-zero (orders of magnitudes less than other users).
What's the rough residential rate in AZ? Here in Seattle (obviously a MUCH different situation wrt water availability) I pay $6.96 per CCF (748.052 US gal, 3400 L). Even if every tree used an entire CCF over a season, that'd still be trivial compared to the amount of nuts you'd get (I assume)
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Absolutely it's a strange choice. From a power perspective it can make sense since solar works very well, but from a water perspective it's a very strange choice. Cheap land is also a very big factor. TSMC purchased over a thousand acres. Where else in the US can you find a thousand acres so near a populous area and so easily accessible off a major freeway like that? Tax promises and Trump trying to sway the state fo…
the west coast also has a pretty low incidence of natural disasters. The east coast regularly gets bad hurricanes, the northeast and midwest get really bad snowstorms, plains states regularly get tornadoes, etc, but on the west coast if you pick a region that's not geologically active then there aren't really a ton of huge natural disasters that occur regularly. of course I guess there's wildfires now too, but that's…
https://www.zdnet.com/article/samsung-reopens-austin-chip-pl...
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What's the rough residential rate in AZ? Here in Seattle (obviously a MUCH different situation wrt water availability) I pay $6.96 per CCF (748.052 US gal, 3400 L). Even if every tree used an entire CCF over a season, that'd still be trivial compared to the amount of nuts you'd get (I assume)
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.
The issue isn't the cost of water, it's that "free" water drives everything else (or imported water - the United States major export often seems to be exporting it's water in the form of crops, food, etc...)
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That’s not much. The average family of 4 in Arizona uses about 325,000 gallons a year. So a billion gallons is equivalent to 3,000 families, or a very small town.
Doesn't smell right, you're saying a family of 4 in Arizona uses ~900 gallons a day? That's 3500L or 3.5 tons of water every day. I mean you can flush the toilet every minute for the whole day and only use about that much water, and that's assume the toilet fills up as fast (it doesn't).
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Doesn't smell right, you're saying a family of 4 in Arizona uses ~900 gallons a day? That's 3500L or 3.5 tons of water every day. I mean you can flush the toilet every minute for the whole day and only use about that much water, and that's assume the toilet fills up as fast (it doesn't).
That number seems really high, but the state website seems to be at least close to that number (146gal/day/person or ~600gal/day for a family of 4). https://new.azwater.gov/conservation/public-resources