Excellent article. I would also like to point out what a very small percentage of total water use is for households. When people think of water conservation, they typically think of low-flow showers and low-water-use dishwashers. Households actually do not use that much water as a percentage, and by far the biggest use within households is home lawns and gardens. So if you want to encourage water conservation, focus on agriculture and the other large water users mentioned in this article.
I question the accuracy of the water consumption of semiconductor manufacturing. Micron is breaking ground outside Syracuse on what is planned to be 4 chip fabs, thanks to $20B in various public subsidies if all 4 fabs are built.
The Onondaga County Water Authority will build a half billion dollar, 25 mile 4' diameter line from Lake Ontario to the Micron facility. It has capacity of 50 million gallons daily that Micron may fully consume (see OCWA launches biggest upgrade ever to double water supply for Micron-spurred growth. Who will pay? https://archive.ph/BKiax). It nearly doubles area water consumption.
In addition to water, 8 million gallons are so toxic it cannot be returned to the watershed. Some will be trucked out of state to injection wells. Waste water contains proprietary trade secret chemicals. 40 million gallons of waste will be treated at a $1.5B plant and returned to the watershed via the Oswego River, close to the county's intakes.
History doesn't repeat, but it seems to rhyme. Recalling Onondaga Lake was the most polluted Lake in the US and is not swimmable of fish able decades after Allied Chemical closed and remediation. Lake Ontario fisheries have many human consumption restrictions from industrial pollution decades ago.
The article is about water, but Micron’s electricity consumption will be over 500MW. One can only speculate the impact on residential and commercial rates.
Excellent article. I would also like to point out what a very small percentage of total water use is for households. When people think of water conservation, they typically think of low-flow showers and low-water-use dishwashers. Households actually do not use that much water as a percentage, and by far the biggest use within households is home lawns and gardens. So if you want to encourage water conservation, focus on agriculture and the other large water users mentioned in this article.
I question the accuracy of the water consumption of semiconductor manufacturing. Micron is breaking ground outside Syracuse on what is planned to be 4 chip fabs, thanks to $20B in various public subsidies if all 4 fabs are built.
The Onondaga County Water Authority will build a half billion dollar, 25 mile 4' diameter line from Lake Ontario to the Micron facility. It has capacity of 50 million gallons daily that Micron may fully consume (see OCWA launches biggest upgrade ever to double water supply for Micron-spurred growth. Who will pay? https://archive.ph/BKiax). It nearly doubles area water consumption.
In addition to water, 8 million gallons are so toxic it cannot be returned to the watershed. Some will be trucked out of state to injection wells. Waste water contains proprietary trade secret chemicals. 40 million gallons of waste will be treated at a $1.5B plant and returned to the watershed via the Oswego River, close to the county's intakes.
History doesn't repeat, but it seems to rhyme. Recalling Onondaga Lake was the most polluted Lake in the US and is not swimmable of fish able decades after Allied Chemical closed and remediation. Lake Ontario fisheries have many human consumption restrictions from industrial pollution decades ago.
The article is about water, but Micron’s electricity consumption will be over 500MW. One can only speculate the impact on residential and commercial rates.
Semiconductor use data comes from this paper, which pegs it at around 110-115 billion liters (~30 billion gallons) a year: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212371719300150
I agree that if one Micron cluster could use up to 50 million gallons a day then this would have to be a serious underestimate.