4 ms·
No water demand is high relative to agriculture. Industrial use is a drop in the bucket (pun intended). Cooling is sort of a thing, but AC is pretty good now,
by bpodgursky 2y ago
No water demand is high relative to agriculture. Industrial use is a drop in the bucket (pun intended).
Cooling is sort of a thing, but AC is pretty good now, and construction / compliance / land costs in other places vastly outweigh the (cheap, in AZ) energy needed.
- buildbot 2y agoWow, by like an order of magnitude. TSMc used 100 million metric tons of water in 2023 - a single californian farm apparently can use 2.9 acre feet per acre, for 8.4 million acres. And acre foot is 325851 gallons… For a total of 2.7e12 gallons!!!
- KoftaBob 2y ago"The primary use of water in semiconductor fabs is for cleaning and rinsing silicon wafers during production. This requires ultrapure water (UPW), which is thousands of times purer than drinking water" So it's not water usage that evaporates and can cause droughts, it can be heavily recycled back into the system.
- monkmartinez 2y agoCorrect! Arizona is dropping the hammer on a bunch of alfalfa farms here. Interesting side note is that most of them were run and owned by Saudi companies or company. There are markedly less cotton farms than when I was a kid. The farms that I have direct knowledge of are very progressive and not afraid of innovation/change which is very encouraging. Also of note is what Arizona does with it's share of the Colorado river. My city chose to recharge the ground water and I believe the results have been acceptable.