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It's interesting to me that this is in Phoenix. Does that mean good things for the city? I thought they were in a desert and running out of water, and not well
by losvedir 2y ago
It's interesting to me that this is in Phoenix. Does that mean good things for the city? I thought they were in a desert and running out of water, and not well positioned for climate change. On the other hand, maybe with more solar panels, electricity and manufacturing will be cheaper there in the future?
- imzadi 2y agoI live here and we are definitely looking toward impending water shortages, and no one care at all. Nestle is in the process of building a 200 acre coffee creamer factory. The major flower delivery services grow their flowers here. We have tons of cotton and alfalfa fields. There are 100s of golf courses and in the wealthier areas everyone has a lush green lawn.
- 0_____0 2y agoSounds like a resource that isn't appropriately priced
- amelius 2y agopriced -> rationed
- mrsilencedogood 2y agoin capitalism, prices are literally how rationing happens. the theory is that it distributes the resources to those who can make them most productive. here, theoretically the water will be used more productively by chipmakers than by farmers, so the chipmakers will be able to out-bid the farmers and the water will be allocated to them. this is the "invisible hand" of the free market.
- loeg 2y agoAlso worth pointing out that residential water uses like bathing/washing water and especially drinking water will easily outbid alfalfa farmers.
- amelius 2y agoNo, rationing is the complete opposite and ensures that not just rich people can have access to a resource. This is basically why the word "rationing" exists in the first place. What good is being "productive" (whatever your definition of it) if poor people die from lack of access to water because chips need to exist.
- mantas 2y agoWhat’s the point of rationing water to monoculture alfalfa fields? Looks like chips factory in that area makes much more sense.
- kragen 2y agoWe aren't talking about drinking-water quantities of water here but about irrigation quantities. Poor people in Arizona are not in danger of dying from thirst. Think Milagro Beanfield War, not Dune. Poor people in Phoenix get their water from the water utility, which gives you 3740+ gallons of potable water per month for US$4.64: https://www.phoenix.gov/waterservicessite/Documents/Rates_Effective_March_2025.pdf https://www.phoenix.gov/waterservicessite/Documents/Rates_Ef... That works out to 0.032¢ per liter. A quarter (25¢) will buy you 760 liters of water, enough to survive for three months. That's about 1000× lower than a price at which even Phoenix's homeless might start dying of thirst due to the cost of water. (Homeless people don't pay the water utility, but they get water from people who do.) Poor people in the country get their water from wells, which cost money to drill but basically nothing to pump more water from. Rationing might be a reasonable thing to do to keep the aquifer from being depleted, but it would be likely to hit poor people much harder than rich people, because poor people don't have the political influence to prevent the enactment of regulations that would hurt them badly, such as a requirement for an environmental review before drilling a new drinking-water well. Rationing could cause poor people to die from lack of access to water. Markets won't, unless you're talking about something like a Mars colony.
- amelius 2y agoWell if you put it like that then I'm starting to wonder what shortage we are talking about in the first place.
- leptons 2y agoThey sold land rights to the Saudis who then siphoned off the water (now revoked said rights). "[The Saudis] used sprinklers to grow alfalfa in La Paz County and exports it to feed dairy cattle in Saudi Arabia. The company did not pay for the water it used under the old agreement." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saudi-arabia-water-access-arizona/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saudi-arabia-water-access-arizo...
- syncsynchalt 2y agoWater rights in the western US are mercenary. There's a healthy market in prior appropriation rights. Just because people don't like what the water is used for doesn't mean the water isn't priced appropriately. You'll still get farmers growing thirsty / pricey crops in the desert if it covers the cost of irrigation.
- paustint 2y agoWe pay about $130/mo for water in north phoenix even if we don't use a drop.
- 0_____0 2y agoThat's nuts. Is that just the customer fee?
- derektank 2y agoPhoenix the city is limited by its existing water rights but the geographical area isn't really that constrained; water rights are just held by private parties, particulaly farmers. ~70% of all water used in the state is used in agriculture. Industrial and residential consumers simply have to purchase those rights if they want to continue to expand in the area and chip making is a high value add industry.
- azemetre 2y agoIs there any historical reason why farming is a big industry in a state associated with deserts? Did manufacturing never take root there until after WW2 when air conditioning became more affordable?
- kragen 2y agoFarming isn't an industry. It's just how you have a civilization when population density is higher than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle can support. People have been farming in Arizona for several thousand years.
- hosh 2y agoI don’t know why this was down voted. This is historically true. The modern canal that runs through Phoenix is built on top of ruins of a much older canal built by indigenous people for farming.
- stackghost 2y ago>Farming isn't an industry. It both is and isn't. Have you seen PETA footage from inside factory farms? It's hellish in that special way only the industrial revolution could produce.
- kragen 2y agoWe're talking about irrigated fields here, not factory farms, which are certainly nightmarish but don't use a major percentage of Arizona's water.
- hosh 2y agoWater in the fabs gets mostly recycled. There’s an old slidedeck from Intel’s Chandler (Phoenix metro area suburb) fab about it. This includes discharging what isn’t recycled to refill ground aquifer. From what I understand, the area is more seismically stable, so the special building structures and equipment for more seismically active places are not needed. There is the presence of ASU. The ASU president had been hired a while back to implement a very different kind of university system focused on broadening (not gate keeping) higher education and building up innovation. This includes both improving graduation rates in the traditional tracks and expanding non-traditional educational tracks. I don’t know if all those were considered by TSMC; they like hiring engineers straight out of college and training them in their methods.
- kevinpet 2y agoThere's no problem with residential water use in Phoenix. There are still farms that could be shut down if water is needed. The biggest problem seems to be parochial NIMBYs. People don't like that TSMC needed to bring in Taiwanese workers to staff up the plant. They are currently posting AI generated renderings of factories with billowing smoke stacks when talking about the proposed Amkor semiconductor packaging plant in Peoria.
- therein 2y ago[flagged]
- Apes 2y ago[flagged]
- zaik 2y ago20 dollars? I wanted a peanut!
- bcrosby95 2y agoLots of the farms exist to provide year around salad. What is more important, year around salad or computer chips? Economically, for Arizona, the answer is pretty clear. This is also why I laugh when people in wet areas talk crap about my state's water problem. My state's problem is your problem too buddy.
- QuercusMax 2y agoAlso, eating raw salad veggies (lettuce in particular) is one of the best ways to get foodborne illnesses like E. Coli.
- alphager 2y agoThe US is a major food exporter with a supply around 125%. Shutting down a few farms in the desert seems worthwhile.
- chris_va 2y agoBoth are true. Looks like the fab requires about 40,000 acre-ft/yr of water. If they really do start running out of water, adding desal of AZ's brackish aquifers would cost the fab about $20m/year. Not really worth it for farming, but completely fine for a fab.
- stackghost 2y ago>40,000 acre-ft/yr of water ... is "acre feet" a common measurement of volume in the USA?
- Glyptodon 2y agoYeah, not uncommon at all in most scenarios where water volume is large enough.
- connicpu 2y agoWe'll use anything but metric lol. It's about 1,233 cubic meters of water.
- kkg_scorpio 2y agoWhich is incidentally only 1% off from half an olympic-size swimming pool. In other words, the fab requires about 20,000 swimming pools of water every year... or equivalently, 1 swimming pool every 27 minutes.
- bialpio 2y agoFor context, https://www.rubyhome.com/blog/swimming-pool-stats/ https://www.rubyhome.com/blog/swimming-pool-stats/ estimates that there are ~500k residential pools in Arizona. Note that those will likely be smaller than a half olympic-size swimming pool.
- syncsynchalt 2y agoThe comparable unit (in terms of estimating irrigation needs vs rainfall vs reservoir draw, which are the terms we reason with in this part of the US) would be the hectare-meter, which is 10,000 cubic meters.
- guywithahat 2y ago[flagged]
- scott_w 2y agoYour comment was posted in January 2025, after 2024 was the "hottest year on record" with numerous climate-related disasters (hurricanes, droughts) hitting with unseen regularity. https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2024-warmest-year-record-about-155degc-above-pre-industrial-level https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2024-warmest-...