Comment by losvedir a year 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?
It’s also worth nothing that the TSMC plant is basically as far north as it’s possible to be while still counting as part of the (huge) Phoenix metro area. The vast majority of the 5 million residents of that metro area are nowhere near the plant and very unlikely to be affected by it in any way.
At least the fabs can recycle the majority of their water. Unlike farms which use more than is needed and are likely producing animal feed for international animals.
I get your point, but not all farms are created equal. Is it really so bad to shut down farms that grow feed for Arab race horses to produce computer chips?
> I get your point, but not all farms are created equal. Is it really so bad to shut down farms that grow feed for Arab race horses to produce computer chips?
That, I agree. I noticed a sibling comment also mentioned that. If the farms in question are of that kind, it is reasonable. I'd just like to object to the creation of a general sense of sacrificing farms for fabs.
Farms recycle the majority of their water as well. Just instead of it looping inside of a closed process it returns to the broader environment.
Arizona and California have outdated water management laws that basically mean that big agriculture gets free water.
Until recently Saudi Arabia was using these laws to grow alfalfa in the desert.
In California, water intensive crops like almond trees get free water.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/climate/arizona-saudi-ara...
Also see the Resnicks' water storage scheme for their almond/pistachio empire:
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/08/lynda-stewar...
The report has a graph showing their farms consume more water then all LA homes.
"Forget it Jake. It's Chinatown."Yes, but... The way the law works is that the farms own that water. The state would likely have to use eminent domain and pay fair market value if they want to take it away. I have no idea what that would cost.
This is an extremely over-simplified take. It depends on entirely on what the farms are producing, their water efficiency, etc. Nobody would seriously suggest that people go hungry so that we can have more chips, so responding as if that's the actual suggestion is unwarranted.
The place is a desert. Growing crops in a desert takes a lot of water, as you might imagine. A smarter thing to do is to not try to grow crops in a desert where it needs so much irrigation. The US has plenty of non-desert land for growing essential crops.
Lots 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.
Also, eating raw salad veggies (lettuce in particular) is one of the best ways to get foodborne illnesses like E. Coli.
Water 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.
Phoenix 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.
Is 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?
Before Phoenix the city was founded, there was a canal built by the indigenous people who live there in the lower Sonoran.
That canal became the basis for Phoenix, and eventually, the big canal that transport water long range through the state.
The other is that, with sufficient water, you can grow year round.
Not that I think industrial ag is good for society.
Phoenix itself is a metro area whose primary economic driver is real estate speculation. Many older citrus orchards has been surrounded, and sometimes bought and redeveloped.
It's sunny for a lot of the year. Ex. you can get an extra harvest of alfalfa per year compared to other climates.
Farming isn't really that large of an industry in Arizona today, maybe 2% of GDP tops. But my understanding is that surface water rights were allocated over a hundred years ago and naturally those rights were allocated to the people that wanted them then, i.e. agricultural landowners.
> Is there any historical reason why farming is a big industry in a state associated with deserts?
California is a desert too.
Farming 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.
Agriculture is an industry. Of course it is. It employs people, it makes use of technology, it is a distinct sector of the economy.
>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.
I am sure that some people will question some of the historiography there, but Cadillac Desert is a book all about the history of water management of the great plains, from Kansas onwards.
TLDR: America has spent a whole lot of money trying to make land more productive for farming, including land where it probably doesn't make much economic sense once you account for the infrastructure costs.
Both 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.
>40,000 acre-ft/yr of water
... is "acre feet" a common measurement of volume in the USA?
Makes sense, since we usually measure rainfall in inches, it's pretty easy to look up weather records for an area to see what the minimum annual rainfall is expected to be.
The 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.
Which 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.
For context, 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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acre-foot
> The acre-foot is a non-SI unit of volume equal to about 1,233 m3 commonly used in the United States in reference to large-scale water resources, such as reservoirs, aqueducts, canals, sewer flow capacity, irrigation water,[1] and river flows.
Seems to be.
Specifically in the desert west, yes.
We measure our land in acres and water is the limiting resource for using it. Water requirements for crops are expressed in feet/year (or inches/day). Combine the two and you get acre-feet.
m^3 would be a less useful unit in terms of calculating water needs out here, the metric equivalent would be hectare-meters (10,000 m^3).
I 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.
They 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-arizo...
Water 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.
in 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.
Your 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-...
There'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.