9 ms·

I live in Phoenix and have heard some of the local discourse about this. Fabs need a lot of water, like a swimming pool. Once you fill it up, then you need com

by hosh 5y ago

I live in Phoenix and have heard some of the local discourse about this. Fabs need a lot of water, like a swimming pool. Once you fill it up, then you need comparatively less to stay operational. Intel has invested in both recycling water as well as partnering with organizations on water conservation and ecology projects. Arizona does draw water from the Colorado River, but among the four states, Arizona is at the bottom of the water rights. We get what is left over after Colorado, California, and Utah get their legal share. The biggest user of water here in Arizona are the commercial farmers. (The Hopi people practice dryland agriculture and so don’t irrigate at all; most everyone else irrigates using inefficient and destructive land management practices). Aquifers here have been draining, and it has been a big issue. Farmers are already getting restricted on water use this year (despite an unusually wet monsoon season), and water restrictions has not hit residential users yet. It is on the radar for policymakers though. Both TSMC and Intel are attracted to Arizona because it is seismically stable. They each had to invest an enormous amount in the more seismically active Taiwan and California, and it gets more sensitive the smaller the chips get. If we want to conserve more water, the most effective way is to change commercial farming practices. Fabs have already invested a lot to reducing ongoing water use. For an example of what I mean by better land management practices in regards to water: https://youtu.be/-8nqnOcoLqE https://youtu.be/-8nqnOcoLqE

icemelt8 5y ago
Excellent informative reply.
da_chicken 5y ago
> The biggest user of water here in Arizona are the commercial farmers. And farming has been booming in Arizona. I lived there about 10 years ago and even then there were a lot of complaints about all the tree farms (almonds, etc.) that were showing up in Arizona. Massive water consumption and virtually impossible to be sustainable in the desert.
- MengerSponge 5y ago
  The irony is that with current incentives, it's a self-reinforcing cycle. Nuts have a huge return on investment, so nut farmers can afford to buy even very expensive water, so they plant more trees, etc etc.
  - hosh 5y ago
    What’s also ironic is that people can grow nut trees in arid land at a smallholder scale. Folks in the permies.com forum talk about chucking nuts randomly, and the ones that survive to grow on their own are more drought-tolerant. If you are not trying to force greater yield in order to squeeze out profit, the nut trees can do well to yield enough for people to have their fair share. When done as part of a practice that involves diversifying crops, the entire smallhold is far more resilient to any number of external pressure, including climate, pests, market crashes, etc.
    - jkestner 5y ago
      Distributed nut farming is cool, and would solve my dilemma as a voracious nut eater. I cut out almonds for the amount of water they suck up in California, but probably every nut is problematic. Too bad resilience against future problems loses to maximizing profits, so all the resources are capital-efficiently extracted from one location before moving on. Even if I buy local, it’s likely that it’s farmed at a damaging scale. I’m guessing that sustainable farming, crop rotations, etc have fewer externalities.
  - MagnumOpus 5y ago
    > 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).
    - xxpor 5y ago
      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)
dillondoyle 5y ago
Interesting relevent article came out from Bloomberg yesterday about Arizona water authority helping boost new more efficient and cheaper drip tech: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-23/how-microdrip-irrigation-systems-use-less-water-and-could-change-farming-forever https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-23/how-micro...
j_walter 5y ago
>Fabs need a lot of water, like a swimming pool. Once you fill it up, then you need comparatively less to stay operational. This is just not true. The amount of cooling required for fabs is extremely significant and without major evaporative cooling you can't get it. With evaporative cooling comes water loss...and not a small amount of it, especially in the desert. You can do a lot to recycle water that is used in the process, but not the water loss using in cooling. This is also evident in the environmental goals set forth by Intel...they talk about returning 100% water to the environment. Well evaporation is back to the environment...
- softfalcon 5y ago
  You’re right, fabs need more water than a swimming pool, maybe a big swimming pool. The fabs in Arizona are likely not going to be the main cause of water shortages there. How do I know this? Cause when Motorola had its massive (and inefficient) fabs running there in the 90’s-00’s and there were water shortages, they kept running just fine off their on premise reserves. Modern fabs are even more efficient with water usage. I know this because I have visited the old fabs and they are quite good at re-using and capturing the water since it’s inside an air controlled bunker. Modern (and older) fabs aren’t open to air, so water loss is minimal.
  - j_walter 5y ago
    The latest 300mm fabs use 10-50X the power of what the old 8" fabs used (I know this for a fact...). That power gets turned into heat and that heat has to be removed. I work at an "inefficient" 200mm factory that has pretty good internal recycling (~65%)...we still use 600K gallons per day. A single state of the art EUV tool uses ~2MW of power...<0.1% of that gets to the wafer. Most of the rest of that is lost to heat...and that heat goes where?
    - hosh 5y ago
      Seeing those numbers, I wonder how much that affects the local microclimate, as that adds a lot of moisture and heat into the air. And if there are ways to add plant life in the surrounding areas that could benefit from it, and from which people can obtain a yield. I'm not so sure about the hotter months, but during the colder months, it can potentially be used for greenhouses, or for when temperature dips during nighttimes. Lots of tropical plants want hotter, moist air and will die from frost.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
> Both TSMC and Intel are attracted to Arizona because it is seismically stable There are a lot of places in the US that are at least as seismically stable and also have more abundant water. I suspect the choice of Arizona has more to do with tax incentives and the fact that fabs already exist there (and thus there is an experienced workforce).
- spaztastical 5y ago
  and those places have hurricanes or tornadoes
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- KirillPanov 5y ago
  Not tax incentives. Predictable regulators. Central Washington is ideal for chip fabs: tons of cheap electricity and excellent infrastructure, massive existing water supply, as/more geologically stable than Arizona, zero hurricanes/tornadoes. Three hours from Seattle is not commuting range, but it's close enough that the chip designers could easily do monthly fab visits. People underestimate how much idea exchange we've lost by separating design from fabrication. Unfortunately Central Washington is part of a state that is known for erratic, wild, and unpredictable whims when it comes to any company whose name isn't "Boeing". It's not about taxes.
  - dandotway 5y ago
    > Unfortunately Central Washington is part of a state that is known for erratic, wild, and unpredictable whims when it comes to any company whose name isn't "Boeing" Microsoft, Amazon, Nintendo, etc., have a strong WA presence and what has WA done to them that is 'unpredictable'? WA has no state income tax and is very billionaire and business friendly. You are perhaps thinking of Seattle politics, but Seattle!=WA. WA votes very blue during elections but it's for the pro-wealthy billionaire-friendly blues. WA doesn't elect the AOC squad type blues.
celestialcheese 5y ago
If seismic stability was the primary concern, why not choose a state like Minnesota? (lowest seismic activity in the US) Is it tax / local governments + seismic stability?

by hosh 5y ago

icemelt8 5y ago

Excellent informative reply.

da_chicken 5y ago

> The biggest user of water here in Arizona are the commercial farmers. And farming has been booming in Arizona. I lived there about 10 years ago and even then there were a lot of complaints about all the tree farms (almonds, etc.) that were showing up in Arizona. Massive water consumption and virtually impossible to be sustainable in the desert.

MengerSponge 5y ago
The irony is that with current incentives, it's a self-reinforcing cycle. Nuts have a huge return on investment, so nut farmers can afford to buy even very expensive water, so they plant more trees, etc etc.
- hosh 5y ago
  What’s also ironic is that people can grow nut trees in arid land at a smallholder scale. Folks in the permies.com forum talk about chucking nuts randomly, and the ones that survive to grow on their own are more drought-tolerant. If you are not trying to force greater yield in order to squeeze out profit, the nut trees can do well to yield enough for people to have their fair share. When done as part of a practice that involves diversifying crops, the entire smallhold is far more resilient to any number of external pressure, including climate, pests, market crashes, etc.
  - jkestner 5y ago
    Distributed nut farming is cool, and would solve my dilemma as a voracious nut eater. I cut out almonds for the amount of water they suck up in California, but probably every nut is problematic. Too bad resilience against future problems loses to maximizing profits, so all the resources are capital-efficiently extracted from one location before moving on. Even if I buy local, it’s likely that it’s farmed at a damaging scale. I’m guessing that sustainable farming, crop rotations, etc have fewer externalities.
- MagnumOpus 5y ago
  > 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).
  - xxpor 5y ago
    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)

dillondoyle 5y ago

Interesting relevent article came out from Bloomberg yesterday about Arizona water authority helping boost new more efficient and cheaper drip tech: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-23/how-microdrip-irrigation-systems-use-less-water-and-could-change-farming-forever https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-23/how-micro...

j_walter 5y ago

>Fabs need a lot of water, like a swimming pool. Once you fill it up, then you need comparatively less to stay operational. This is just not true. The amount of cooling required for fabs is extremely significant and without major evaporative cooling you can't get it. With evaporative cooling comes water loss...and not a small amount of it, especially in the desert. You can do a lot to recycle water that is used in the process, but not the water loss using in cooling. This is also evident in the environmental goals set forth by Intel...they talk about returning 100% water to the environment. Well evaporation is back to the environment...

softfalcon 5y ago
You’re right, fabs need more water than a swimming pool, maybe a big swimming pool. The fabs in Arizona are likely not going to be the main cause of water shortages there. How do I know this? Cause when Motorola had its massive (and inefficient) fabs running there in the 90’s-00’s and there were water shortages, they kept running just fine off their on premise reserves. Modern fabs are even more efficient with water usage. I know this because I have visited the old fabs and they are quite good at re-using and capturing the water since it’s inside an air controlled bunker. Modern (and older) fabs aren’t open to air, so water loss is minimal.
- j_walter 5y ago
  The latest 300mm fabs use 10-50X the power of what the old 8" fabs used (I know this for a fact...). That power gets turned into heat and that heat has to be removed. I work at an "inefficient" 200mm factory that has pretty good internal recycling (~65%)...we still use 600K gallons per day. A single state of the art EUV tool uses ~2MW of power...<0.1% of that gets to the wafer. Most of the rest of that is lost to heat...and that heat goes where?
  - hosh 5y ago
    Seeing those numbers, I wonder how much that affects the local microclimate, as that adds a lot of moisture and heat into the air. And if there are ways to add plant life in the surrounding areas that could benefit from it, and from which people can obtain a yield. I'm not so sure about the hotter months, but during the colder months, it can potentially be used for greenhouses, or for when temperature dips during nighttimes. Lots of tropical plants want hotter, moist air and will die from frost.

UncleOxidant 5y ago

> Both TSMC and Intel are attracted to Arizona because it is seismically stable There are a lot of places in the US that are at least as seismically stable and also have more abundant water. I suspect the choice of Arizona has more to do with tax incentives and the fact that fabs already exist there (and thus there is an experienced workforce).

spaztastical 5y ago
and those places have hurricanes or tornadoes
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
KirillPanov 5y ago
Not tax incentives. Predictable regulators. Central Washington is ideal for chip fabs: tons of cheap electricity and excellent infrastructure, massive existing water supply, as/more geologically stable than Arizona, zero hurricanes/tornadoes. Three hours from Seattle is not commuting range, but it's close enough that the chip designers could easily do monthly fab visits. People underestimate how much idea exchange we've lost by separating design from fabrication. Unfortunately Central Washington is part of a state that is known for erratic, wild, and unpredictable whims when it comes to any company whose name isn't "Boeing". It's not about taxes.
- dandotway 5y ago
  > Unfortunately Central Washington is part of a state that is known for erratic, wild, and unpredictable whims when it comes to any company whose name isn't "Boeing" Microsoft, Amazon, Nintendo, etc., have a strong WA presence and what has WA done to them that is 'unpredictable'? WA has no state income tax and is very billionaire and business friendly. You are perhaps thinking of Seattle politics, but Seattle!=WA. WA votes very blue during elections but it's for the pro-wealthy billionaire-friendly blues. WA doesn't elect the AOC squad type blues.

celestialcheese 5y ago

If seismic stability was the primary concern, why not choose a state like Minnesota? (lowest seismic activity in the US) Is it tax / local governments + seismic stability?