The Water Wars Come to the Suburbs
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I have no information about this, but I would expect that homeowner's insurance should get much more expensive for these locations as without access to water it's quite hard to have firefighting infrastructure. Without firefighters, homes and humans are at much higher risk. Maybe insurance economics will help to resolve this?
It's pretty normal in rural areas to basically not have a fire department for all practical purposes anyway. Yeah, they often have a volunteer fire department, but when your best case scenario response time is like 30 minutes, you're not gonna save structures anyway. That's not considering the wildfire risk at all.
You could say that having homes that depend on cisterns actually helps in firefighting efforts:
I volunteer with our rural, island-based fire department. The more populated part has 90% or more of the people, and is part of our coverage area. The larger part is more parks and forest, and sees regional coverage such as chopper- or truck-based crews, helicopters and so on.
Each of the engine trucks carries something like 1000 gallons of water, and is kept full. So are the tenders, which can dump into the "porta-pond" as in that video. The water supply team has a list of available sources of water that they can go to to keep that water flowing, but if there is nothing nearby, the round-trip time will get longer, and firefighters will have to leave the building until there is water available.
Wildfire fighting is very different, and much more focused on containing the edges of the fire by using natural fire breaks or creating new ones. (Think picks and shovels, heli buckets, and heavy equipment where available.) If there is a house or two threatened, maybe some sprinklers can be set up ahead of the fire. If the house is on fire, too bad, efforts are on what's ahead.
Lol... no. There are so many flawed assumptions here I'm not sure where to start. Basically everything you said was wrong.
First, the "neighbor house" would typically be hundreds of yards away at the absolute closest.
Second, the availability of water for fire fighting purposes in rural areas is commonly dubious normally. It's exceedingly rare that a residence will have any form of pressurized water like "personal hydrant" type of system. At best, they might have a 2,500 gallon polyethylene tank, or a pond they could dip into, IF the volunteer fire department has a pump and hose setup, which is itself kind of rare or slow to arrive.
Third, a lot of the efforts on scene are unlikely to involve water at all. It's more like wild-land fire style where you might try to cut fire lines and stuff to try and prevent igniting surrounding areas, evacuate and render aid to affected people, etc.
If they really are building on multi-acre lots then you're probably right. But if it's more like a suburban style where houses are on 0.25 acre lots and there's only maybe 15-20 feet between houses then I feel my concerns are legit.
From the article: "They believe that the county is not going to let five hundred homes next to one of the wealthiest cities go without water.”
In their mind: "This is America." Meaning they are used to living in the "Land of plenty" never thinking that one day, it could end.
This was my thought as well. The music is about to stop. Many don't realize it. Some don't believe it. Some actively deny it. But it's happening, and faster than we're ready for.
We can still avert most of the predicted catastrophes, but we need to stop letting the people with the money just dictate policy to the rest of us to favor themselves.
In some ways it's nice to not have an HOA, no one bugs me if my lawn is looking sad. But in other ways it would be nice to have a unified group to take care of some neighborhood things, like unifying garbage pickup since we have private garbage companies here: there's probably 6 different companies who service my neighborhood on all 5 days of the week, it would be nice if we all just had 1 and probably we could all save some money this way too.
In many locations neither of those items are purview of the HOA, those would be City ordinances and City Services.
HOA's in my experience fit 2 molds, with some over lap
The first takes care of common property of the community, like playgrounds, community centers, etc.
Then you have rules enforcement, which are beyond the standard city rules like length of grass, in the realm of the type and style of grass you can have, the plants you can have, the color of the home, the type of (or if you can) have a pool, or structure, or Playground, etc etc etc.
These HOA expanded on what would be normal governmental regulations around safety, and go into the realm of "property value" protection, and other ascetics needs of the community
Pools and structures like decks or sheds are regulated by the building code of the town, but they do not impact your property value for property taxes. Pools specifically also don't seem to impact property value when you sell, a pool is only useful here for 3 months of the year and lots of people don't want to deal with maintaining them. I would happily pay an HOA to take care of a nice neighborhood pool instead of maintaining my own but I've never seen a local single-family home neighborhood with a community pool here.
1) The conspiracy theory is that intentionally pointless HOAs were pushed by small government folks as a way to make people skeptical of tax-for-service organizations.
2) The HOAs point isn’t to regulate the 99% of people who would otherwise maintain their house. It’s for the 1% of people that wouldn’t and in order to avoid housing discrimination charges, you have to regulate everyone equally.
This is representative of the core conflict of American politics that makes it so confusing to outsiders - ideologically, the people in power (often delusionally) identify with Europe, but in practice, they desire power dynamics similar to oligopolies seen in the developing world.
Not to go too far with the metaphor, but if America never established race-based slavery (and instead, racial minorities were primarily the small number of remaining Native Americans), I bet we'd have a similar political system to Australia (where overtly exclusionary practices are more frowned upon).
All the FL/TX ones even come with gates.
The Governor last year: "“There’s something that is truly Californian about the wilderness and the wild and pioneering spirit,” Newsom said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I’m not advocating for no (building).” [1]
AFAIK, lawmakers are actually considering subsidizing insurance costs for exurbs in places that were never meant to host human habitation year round.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/b17b5c9200a64466b49f3f605f9202fe
For example of the latter, the Winnipeg floodway is a huge ditch around Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Built in the late '50s, it diverts the Red River around the city, reconnecting further north. It was seen as a huge boondoggle when being built, but has saved much of the city repeatedly since.
and which places on earth were meant for humans exactly?
That said, I see wiggle room on "if nothing changes there eventually won't be enough water", even if we all know that in practice nothing will change in time, so I don't know how that actually plays out.
Last year I ran across an LA Times article about how people were making different life choices due to the pandemic, and and other factors - specifically moving from LA to this place. In contrast to locals who tend to build low houses and choose colors that blend with the desert landscape, these people were painting their houses bright white and, I kid you not, installing swimming pools.
Denial is incredibly powerful. Most people can't really comprehend that there isn't enough water in that region (even though it should be obvious). We've lived in a time of plenty for so long the idea that something as fundamental as water could be limited just seems impossible.
You see this everywhere, and only tend to notice the denial when the problems don't impact you. Comments pointing out concerns that impact tech or everyone are frequently downvoted to oblivion here on HN. I saw a comment claiming that democracy in the US has been under threat, something no one who was observing the US from outside would deny, get downvoted to oblivion and decried as pure hyperbole.
We're all living in a constant and escalating state of cognitive dissonance, the world around is collapsing in multiple ways, but locally you aren't allowed to acknowledge this. The "this is fine meme" summarizes our current environment perfectly.
Y2k comes to mind. I was in high school at the time, and still remember all the breathless articles. The trains would stop, the water treatment plants would fail, the traffic lights would go haywire. Somewhere within each semi truck, grid sub-station and bank mainframe was a tiny ticking time bomb that would rollover in a few short months to 00 and implode into chaos. For the want of a few bits, the implements of modern life would become useless hunks of scrap. The crusty cobol programmers were working round the clock to stop it but there simply weren't enough of them or the source code was missing or nobody had a compiler anymore. We were doomed.
Turns out, the damned lights didn't even flicker at midnight.
And with rise of click-driven journalism, it's even worse.
I have a cabin on some land near Joshua Tree. There's water in the ground (300-400ft down) but I haven't bothered to put in a well, instead just hauling what little I need from the nearby town's bulk water dispenser.
Unlike AZ apparently, CA doesn't allow any new construction without a secure and sufficient water supply. Installing new cisterns for receiving hauled water is no longer permitted, but existing cisterns are grandfathered in. It seems like they never make any exceptions. A nearby fire station permanently closed when their well water was found to be too toxic and they weren't permitted to install a cistern for hauled water.
It seems like AZ could solve this issue state-wide by adopting a similar permitting requirement, instead of having these parcels-of-5 loopholes enabling entire subdivisions to be built without water.
The problems my area has been dealing with are illegal agriculture (large marijuana grows) depleting the ground water, and there's always some hare-brained commercial plan trying to plow through the red-tape and resell the cheap but finite groundwater in one form or another.
But I have similar experience at a cabin without winterized plumbing and an iffy cistern, so over winter we haul in water too and melt more as needed. Probably going to install an incinerating toilet to augment the privy one day. It really makes you think about need vs. want. Lots of great USB-rechargeable pumps for hand-washing and shower head doo-hickeys these days.
That reminds me of one of my favorite sentences: "Yes, while some of you may think nothing of pooping into a mechanical box of fire, the prospect is a rather new idea for yours truly."
“We got two great offers in, and neither of them cared about the water situation. They believe that the county is not going to let five hundred homes next to one of the wealthiest cities go without water.”
We'll see what happens in 2023, when Scottsdale no longer sells water to the water haulers.
The Water Knife feels more and more prophetic.
As such, I'm not sure I would call it chilling so much as entirely predictable.
The real failure is in the states and municipalities that are approving the building in the first place.
They are solving today’s problems. The fact that our lifestyles are not even sustainable even ignoring global warming, but just from an infrastructure perspective is never addressed.
In the Bay Area the ocean coast communities aren’t very impacted. The Bay coast is significantly impacted, Foster City is already building a levee.
In 10-15 years, the lawsuits surrounding construction of a new levee will make them take forever and cost a fortune.
Because they know that politicians will step in and have the government pay their bill. Too rich to fail.
There are very few, if any, places on earth that don’t come with risks from nature.
https://www.delmartimes.net/news/story/2021-06-11/seawall-ap...
Or outright defiance, apparently based on contempt for the CC's ability to enforce the law:
Basically they ran the numbers and figured out that more than 50% of cities simply cannot afford to maintain the suburb infrastructure no matter what they do with the budget. Even if they did something crazy like tripled taxes tomorrow they still could not afford it. The called them zombie cities or something like that.
[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6...
- Other countries do have expansive suburbs. They don't look like ours, but they are fundamentally the same. Get outside of any major metropolitan and you will see spaced out houses in subdivisions with lawns.
- The ASCE number is a bit of a joke - this is a marketing number for the purposes of pushing investment in engineering firms. In reality, your city doesn't need to pay to rebuild every suburban road it has when filling potholes is cheap.
- Furthermore, this article does nothing to actually link these liabilities to where the revenues occur. The giant cost of replacing an aging power plant completely dwarfs the cost of suburban power lines. But a new subdivision is a huge tax boon to a community.
The cost of building out infrastructure the first time is covered by the sale of the newly constructed properties (and sometimes state or federal grant money) which is all one-time income.
Taxes are supposed to cover the eventual replacement cost, but they can’t because the level of taxation required to actually do this would make suburbs unaffordable. Instead, they primarily use debt and tax revenue from newer properties that are supposed to be paying for their own eventual infrastructure replacement to make up the deficit.
This is why Strong Towns calls it the growth ponzi scheme: the city can only outrun the cost of infrastructure replacement by taking money from new properties to pay for old ones until they run out of land to build or assets to leverage for debt, at which point the whole scheme fails.
At least in my travels, the suburbs I've seen outside the US have only borne a very surface-level similarity to their US counterparts. There are lawns and the houses are detached, but the suburbs themselves tend to be much denser and connected to city centers via rail. These combine to make European suburbs more sustainable than their American counterparts.
(There are other factors as well: most of Continental Europe has much more consistent rainfall than the Continental US, and there's no particular evidence that their suburban constructions are ultimately sustainable either -- they may just be more than our ludicrously unsustainable ones.)
Sure maintenance comes around, but it always seems to work out, somehow.
I spent a couple years in Macomb, IL when I was a kid. Take a look at that place on Street View.
Overall population growth is mostly what has allowed for things to “work out” previously, but as the rate of growth slows down or even goes negative for the first time in recent history, the necessary conditions may not hold anymore for things to “work out”.
However if it’s more than a mile it may not be walkable but that’s not the same thing as unsustainable.
Small towns haven't historically been built like that.
> What is obvious here is that the poor neighborhoods are profitable while the affluent neighborhoods are not. Throughout the poor neighborhoods, the city is -- TODAY -- bringing in more revenue than they will spend to maintain the neighborhood, and that's assuming they actually invest the money to maintain the neighborhood (which they have not been). If they fail to maintain the neighborhood, the profit margins will be even higher.
> This might strike some of you as surprising, yet it is important to understand that it is a consistent feature we see revealed in city after city after city all over North America. Poor neighborhoods subsidize the affluent; it is a ubiquitous condition of the American development pattern.
Deserts have wildlife, yes, but they have much less biomass than the other places humans live. A person living in Arizona or Nevada is displacing much less natural wildlife than a person like me, living in Seattle.
So I say let's embrace people living in water-starved areas like the Southwest. We can enable it by smart water usage, like you see in Vegas, combined with things like smart water diversion and desalinization.
Last time I checked, Vegas also gets the majority of its water from the Colorado River, including via Lake Mead. No amount of smart water usage is going to change the macro climate patterns here.
Besides, apartment buildings exist in desert cities too. The question wasn't about density, it was about building in deserts or not. Building in deserts is better for the environment.
I would be very surprised if Arizona either has or is building high-density apartment housing at the rate that Seattle or any other dense coastal state is. There's simply less incentive to.
It seems like the suburbs who actually pay taxes to provide the water are being prioritised for water access and the people who intentionally built were there were no rules are upset that other people aren't following the rules.
This is exactly the John Galt/John Wayne hybrid cultural identity that you're saying doesn't exist manifesting itself. That same "individualism" is why we can't come together long enough to build water infrastructure for people who belong to that same community. It's genuine insanity. Americans deserve every bit of pain we're about to experience over water rights in the coming decades because we won't acknowledge that mentality is the problem.
> Residents who didn’t like the idea of a utility formed by their neighbors found the idea of a private water provider more palatable. “I trust them,” Jackman told me. “I think they’re smart. This is what they do.”
I'm not sure I entirely believe you when you say Americans as a whole have a desire to solve things as a community. That can be true of some, and maybe even the majority, but I firmly believe there's enough of a general "Fuck you, I got mine" attitude to screw over a large number of people.
people want to live where it’s sunny and warm
The dispute is about scale: a couple of million retirees equal a lot of speculative housing value, but they don't justify a megaproject to deliver water to the middle of the desert. That would require population migration on a scale not seen in over a century in the US.
More to the point, you've assuming the conclusion. If we could distill and pump water from the Pacific Ocean to Arizona at cost-effective rates then yes, it would be a significant technological innovation.
But knowing that it would be a significant technological innovation doesn't make it happen. We don't have many flying cars, even though the technology has been around for decades. Yet cheap flying cars would be a significant technological innovation, yes?
We already have the ability to transport Pacific water from the Carlsbad Desalination Plant in San Diego to Arizona, via the road system. If your argument has merit, then we should be seeing the existing price getting lower, right?
What isn't the price going down fast enough to meet the obvious demand?
"We don't have many flying cars..." because of reasons that are completely out of the scope of this discussion. The airspace has a different set of rules and "vehicle operator" requirements in comparison to...the ground. Considering that many have trouble operating ground vehicles in a safe manner, i doubt that we're ever going to have manually controlled "flying cars" being a viable transportation option. And no, they wouldn't be as significant as the shift from ground travel to AIR, as we already have air travel options.
I didn't say that there is "an obvious demand", in fact i said quite the opposite, that not many people are going to want to live in the desert. When you're talking about the costs, do you mean the costs of desalination, transportation or both?
The cost of desalination, the costs to build and maintain the tunnel/aqueduct system, the cost pumping water from sea level to 1,000 feet (elevation for Phoenix - likely more as the traversed part of the San Joaquin Valley is below sea level.)
To say nothing of the political and ecological costs - look at how well the Colorado River Compact has turned out, and the effect on the Colorado River Delta.
Water flows uphill towards money, certainly, but that's going to need a lot of money.
Speaking of the San Joaquin Valley, I would expect this water distribution system to irrigate California farmland first.
If you have an issue with my suggestion that perhaps more well-off communities could encourage the developments in the water technology, then i'd like to say that i don't mean that farmers needs should be ignored in favour of some "weirdos living in a desert".
> Are those projects unnecessary?
joshuaheard's hypothetical interstate water transport project? Yes, unnecessary.
There are other lower-cost solutions. It'll be cheaper to provide free Earthships / passive homes / etc. to everyone in the desert southwest and ban outdoor watering. It'll be cheaper to build a New Cleveland and relocate the entire population of AZ to Ohio.
If you want to live in the desert, stop pretending you live in the English countryside. Every well sucking up irreplaceable water is a temporary facade against reality, and that facade is now crumbling.
> to resolve the water supply issues in countries such as Australia for example
That's to provide for coastal cities, not to provide water to Alice Springs.
> perhaps more well-off communities could encourage the developments in the water technology
Don't you understand? They did. The story mentions wells drilled down nine hundred feet to find water, and transporting water from different watersheds. That's all based on improved methods for drilling, pumping, and transporting.
Before about 80 years ago, we didn't have pumps able to drain the Ogallala. Now parts of that aquifer are 300 feet lower. Improve the technology? Lower the level. Until it's bone dry. And then what?
Sometimes the only way to win is to play a different game.
"That's to provide for coastal cities..." which is closer to actual viable application, provided that those cities have a backbone to rely on in case the supply chain slows down for whatever reason.
"...Improve the technology? Lower the level. Until it's bone dry. And then what?" Yeah, sounds pointless, i understand your point now.
Entrenched money interests won't just accept the situation, they'll fight with every plausible tool, for better or worse.
So what exactly is the solution?
Too expensive for what? Too expensive is a continuum.
Canals are a well-known technology. Humanity has several thousand years of experience with them.
Desalination is the real problem.
- The desert is probably the best place to build sprawling metropolises with the lowest ecological impact (overall)
- Cooling is more energy efficient than heating.
- Houses in places like AZ are implicitly less wasteful (no lawns, better insulated, etc).
- People like it
But the question is how to get water to these places? Especially knowing now that the Colorado River Compact was designed when rainfall was at historic highs. But I don't think there is any long term solution that doesn't involve California giving up on taking other state's water to grow high-intensity agriculture.
At the end of the day, I don't actually care about moralizing what's wasteful or not if the owner is being charged the proper cost to acquire. If that's $1 a gallon for solar and desalination/recycled water, enjoy that lawn.
(Pedantic person side note: pools are not actually that wasteful. If they are properly covered when not in use, evaporative loss is actually pretty minimal).
This isn't true. Compare NYC's average of 117 GPD[1] to TMWA's 165 GPD[2]. That's 40% more water use, per individual. The last year that NYC's residents came close to using that much water was 1996.
[1]: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dep/water/history-of-drought-water...
[2]: https://www.nevadatomorrow.org/indicators/index/view?indicat...
It's being pumped out faster than it can be replenished. Rivers are drained dry.
People have built for decades on the belief that water will never be its true cost.
Now it's the end of that day.
The "proper cost to acquire" isn't enough. Who pays the cost of repairing the damage done, like groundwater-related subsidence? Of restoring ecosystems?
In theory, I feel the same way. However, I'm not sure anybody is paying anywhere near the proper cost with externalities included.
Ecological impact includes draining aquifers and diverting rivers.
Human civilizations, particularly dense ones, have preferred oceans and rivers near temperate rainforests (like the entire Northeast) for this reason. The marginal advantages of less heating aren't outweighed by the resource and economic advantages of living near large bodies of water in areas where the geology and ecology actually supports it.
Israel is a good model for how you can invest heavily in desalination and irrigation efficiency and support profitable agriculture, even in wasteland spaces.
Israel is an unusual case: it's a state that exists more or less by religious mandate, meaning that its residents have gone above and beyond ordinary economic and political forces to make it livable. Lots of individual outcomes there can be applied elsewhere (like drip irrigation), but much is also politically infeasible in the US (like Israel's central authority that progressively taxes commercial water use.) Ecological variables also differ: the majority of people in Israel live in the Northern half of the country, which is wetter and greener than the American Southwest. That's also where agriculture is concentrated.
How is that?
First thing ofcourse is everything we do as human, including our body is generating heat, for my cooling my home is FAR FAR FAR more expensive (thus i would assume more energy intensive) than heating my home.
>>Houses in places like AZ are implicitly less wasteful (no lawns, better insulated, etc).
This is largely government zoning or HOA's here, people outside of AZ could allow for less lawns as well. This would require a cultural shift. I would love to replace my lawn with something I did not have to mow, but my local government prevents that
>- People like it
Some people like, some people (like me) like cold climates, or places with seasonal changes. I would never in a million years live in the south west US, I prefer places that snow.
They mandate you have a grass lawn?
I agree it's kind of ridiculous, but I also live in an area known for its onerous HOAs, and these ordinances are basically just a subset of that writ large, but without the worst of it. I'll still take this over living in an HOA.
These are set in a variety of zoning, building, and maintenance ordinances
For your "native garden" depending on your meaning could be banned because the city classifies all "unmaintained plants" to be weeds in violation of the ordinance.
Various zoning and building codes outline ground coverings for run off, and flood control purposes.
Then you have separate regulations about shrubs and trees,
All of these combined make grass the easiest way to comply with the government even if the government does to implicitly require grass
If you put enough roadblocks, hurtles, etc in front of something it becomes a functional ban
Case in point see the 2 most controversial subjects of today Abortion and Gun Rights, with each political side attempting functional bans with out actually "banning" the thing out right
This is partially because the temperature deltas are smaller. If you are aiming for 70 inside and you have 95 outside, you are fighting a 25-degree delta. But if you want 70 inside and have 25 outside, that’s a 45-degree delta the system has to overcome.
Snow is actually helpful by insulating. The sun is closer to the horizon over winter, so it's your vertical windows doing the heating anyway.
An obvious issue is how much sunlight you get over winter. Not just in hours, but in N. Europe, you might have continuous cloudcover and not see the sun for weeks at a time.
But you are also dealing with angle of declination. Solar gain will be diminishing the further north you go even if you get sunlight.
"Together with the comprehensive energy conservation measures taken, this means that a conventional central heating system is not necessary, although they are sometimes installed due to client skepticism." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house#Space_heating . See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_heating_building .
> Passive cooling, solar air conditioning, and other solutions in passive solar building design need to be studied to adapt the Passive house concept for use in more regions of the world.
> There is a certified Passive House in the hot and humid climate of Lafayette, Louisiana, USA, which uses energy recovery ventilation and an efficient one ton air-conditioner to provide cooling and dehumidification.
Earlier, "In August 2010, there were approximately 25,000 such certified structures of all types in Europe. The vast majority of passive structures have been built in German-speaking countries and Scandinavia."
1) it's easier in the Scandinavian and German-speaking countries because passive house building materials are easier and cheaper to acquire ("other countries may spend 8% more on constructing Passive Houses than conventional buildings because the Passive House components may not be readily available" - "Examing the Prospective of Implementing Passive House Standards in Providing Sustainable Schools", https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.5031991?casa_tok...)
2) it's easier in cooler areas because there's more experience in how to build for those climates (as Wikipedia points out).
3) it's easier in cooler areas because the energy saved is higher, and so easier to justify economically. "Passive Houses for different climate zones" at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037877881... shows "Energy demands of the Reference Passive Houses in the different locations" in Table 3, with:
Yekaterinburg Tokyo Shanghai Las Vegas Singapore Abu Dhabi
Total saving 96% 90% 87% 86% 79% 77%
(Sorry, I can't find TCO.)
4) From my understanding, it's easier to well-insulate and let body heat and appliances provide the heat, using the cool exterior to regulate temperature, than it is to deal with cooling and humidity issues in warmer climates to bring the internal temperature to the "inner comfort range" specified by the Passivhaus Institute, Fig. 8 of the link in 3).
For me even when it is 25 outside occupied my home will settle at about 40-50 or so with no heat, due to just cooking, lighting, compters, TV etc that are all outputing heat...
so the delta I am attempting to heat is not really 25 to 70, but more like 50 to 70 due to the waste heat and solar heating effect
For cooling I am not not only battling the outside delta, but also all of that waste heat and solar heating effects
And in aggregate, cities in warm climates are more sustainable than in cold: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/014...
>> This would require a cultural shift.
Agreed. Or people can move to places like AZ or NV where lawns are the exception.
>> I would never in a million years live in the south west US
Agreed. I like the PNW too much to move. But my argument here is just letting people do what they want (move to warm deserts) is a net benefit to society.
hmm, looks like energy expenditures are the same, they note that energy costs are higher in AZ
So the question would be is the reduction due to budgets, meaning given the option the people in AZ would set their AC lower, and be more comfortable if they could afford too and the high cost prevents that
Or is it actually more efficient as the claim was?
This one doesn't hold water (no pun intended). Over the next few generations, people in the US are going to have to give up a whole lot of things they like.
But the reason cooling is cheaper is the temperature differential. AZ might get to, say, 110°F peak (and far cooler at night), for a temp delta of 35°F while the Midwest will stay below 20°F for months, and even colder at night, for a temp differential no better than 50°F during the day and 60°F at night.
In cooling mode they provide a source of fresh-distilled water! It always bothered me when air conditioners just dump that water down the sanitary drain instead of pumping it in a garden or misting it on the outside coils.
Fresh is not the word I would use for condensate. Try drinking some of you disagree :). It's corrosive for metal,{EDIT: maybe I just have that confused, see replies} which is why it usually doesn't find a purpose, but you could run it to plants. I have a window A/C which uses it for cooling the outside coils though.
Legionella is a concern though.
https://www.environmentalleader.com/2013/01/air-conditioning...
that's thermodynamically impossible. @dktoao, being a mechanical engineer, surely understands this, and made a statement that is different, and more plausible.
COP is a ratio of change in energy (e.g., temperature) produced against a common benchmark (running electricity through a resistive element, for example). that's how it can be greater than 100%. absolute efficiency (what @dktoao offered) compares against a 100% conversion of energy from one form (or place) to another. in this case, you cannot beat 100% (or generally get super close) due to the 2nd law of thermo.
And, "efficiency" doesn't matter. COP does. COP is what is reflected on your electrical bills.
If I am in my house, use 1000 W of electricity, get 3000 W of heating, that is what is important. No shit the extra heat comes from the environment. It doesn't matter unless you live within a house completely located inside an artificial climate-controlled area, which applies to... none. No houses.
Considering the temperature extremes that southern US versus northern US housing experiences over the entire year, it's probably easier to keep the southern house around 21C than the northern one.
https://zeroenergyproject.org/warmer-climate-construction-de...
https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/reports/2009/sta...
Sure, but in a cool climate you need much less cooling to be comfortable than you need heating in even a neutral climate.
The only problem is then these metropolises are in the desert, and you have to ship all agricultural products to them. That's fine most of the time when times are good and supply chains work, but it's fragile, if anything goes wrong enough in the worldwide food markets. A desert metropolis is like an island nation that must import all its food.
A precarious position if times ever get tough. I believe currently the USA is a net exporter of food products, but if you started building and growing enough desert cities that might stop being the case
If you disturb prairie it comes back after a couple of years of rain. Not so the desert.
A few years ago I saw this coming and invented the Waterless Toilet. It's like a kitty litter box but for people who live in areas like those discussed in the article. Why scramble for toilet water when you can just use the Waterless Toilet?
I've been trying to get funding for this so please reach out if interested.
Maybe it would still be usable by cats, too?
In the desert where the water table is hundreds of feet below you (and getting lower!), groundwater contamination isn't exactly an issue.
But there's also composting toilets and incinerating toilets that exist. A fancy incinerating toilet costs like $5k (Cinderalla toilet, I'm looking at you!), but I'm sure they'll cost a fraction of that in time. But there is an electricity cost to each 'flush' then.
You are forced to figure out how to deliver enough value to be clearly better than shitting in a bucket, yet not much more expensive, to avoid competing with composting or incinerating toilets. I wonder if you actually might do better starting from a composting design and trying to improve it to make it more cost effective.
Sorry for the pessimism, just some things to think about! Maybe there is a path through, wish you the best.
new suburb developments in az are required to prove they have a 100 year water supply