Comment by chris_va 4 days ago
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.
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).
>40,000 acre-ft/yr of water
... is "acre feet" a common measurement of volume in the USA?