Intel breaks ground on $20B Arizona plants as U.S. chip factory race heats up

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.

They're also:

- producing useful things

- employing people to do said production (and design the production process, and the thing that's getting produced)

- paying suppliers for the parts that go into the useful things getting produced

As I mentioned in my longer comment elsewhere, Arizona is seismically stable, and fabs don’t need specialized structures when using advanced process nodes.

The biggest misuse of water resources and poor land management comes from our conventional, commercial farming practice. Healthy, living soil can do a lot ecologically including water conservation, but we farm in a way to continually deplete soil.

Changing how residential homeowners do landscaping can help as well.

I don't expect this to happen.

It's unfortunate that alongside this incredibly important detail the article carries a bunch of highly judgemental wording that encourages people to incorrectly interpret "use" not as "cycle through" but as "remove from water supply and banish to a superfund site."

The rest of the comment section is guilty of this too.

I fully appreciate the need for independent verification, but assuming the worst is not that, and it actually leads to bad incentives in the same way as assuming the best (or refusing to think about it at all) leads to bad incentives.

While Arizona is landlocked there's also not a ton of distance between it and the Gulf of California so they could do desalinization, although I imagine that's too costly to consider at the moment.

> It has its own water treatment plant at its Ocotillo campus in Chandler that’s similar to a municipal plant. There’s also a “brine reduction facility,” a public-private partnership with the city of Chandler, that brings 2.5 million gallons of Intel’s wastewater a day back to drinking standard. Intel uses some of the treated water again, and the rest is sent to replenish groundwater sources or be used by surrounding communities.

Now that water can either be returned to the river/lake/aquifer or if you clean it sufficiently well it can go straight into municipal drinking water supplies. That's how this fresh water comes out of nowhere.

It’s pretty typical corporate green washing of a real problem that other folks will end up having in diffuse, hard to pin on them ways, that with some nudging on the right officials will never be pinned on them. In my experience, anyway.

They essentially rob their population in order to do it. If a government isn't paying, it's corrupt.

Water is heavily subsidized in AZ. There is little incentive to conserve it.

So we are talking about agriculture forgoing 569,000 lbs of cotton per year. Farmers get about $0.60/lb for cotton. The impact on the agricultural industry is $341,000/year.

Buy out the worst cotton farmer in the state. Take his water. Move on.

We have some evaporation loss, but in the Phoenix climate it would be a lot more.

(also Tucsonian) Whats really sad is we still have to search far and wide for decent quality hay to feed to our horses...

The fab investments also create a nexus of interesting jobs related to construction and fab operations. I really enjoy working in the latter sector.

Tax promises and Trump trying to sway the state for the 2020 election had more to do with the choice than anything I think.

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).

In a residential setting, it is typically a single-use where water purified to drinking water standards are used to flush toilets and water the lawn.

The idea here is to make better use of inputs and outputs. The folks in the Earthship projects just outside of Taos, NM build residences that cycle water 3-4 times before it goes out through a septic field, which feeds vegetation.

In none of those cycles, are the water re-used for the same purpose. You don’t try to purify grey water from bathing to reuse for bathing or washing, and instead, it is treated onsite through plants to reuse for things like flushing toilets. Water transports things, so what you look at is what is the waste being carried and how can that “waste” be used as an input for something else.

In the case of the fab, it sounds as if the major waste being carried is heat, via evaporative cooling. As I have mentioned in a different comment, that likely changes the microclimate near the fabs. So one area to look at are what kind of yields we can get with that changed microclimate? It depends upon the design of the cooling towers, and weather the water carrying the waste heat was still liquid when it got to the tower. Maybe there is another use for heated water, not specifically in the fab process itself, but something that could benefit humans and the ecology in a different way. For example, diverting some of that water to areas where zone 10 (tropical) plants are put into cultivation.

I recall IBM and other tech companies being called out for occasionally deliberately moving campuses to other states because this creates an excuse to sever certain employees who can't otherwise be lawfully fired.

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.