Taiwan Has Enough Water To Keep Chipmakers Humming Till May

Hmmmmmm shares a report from Bloomberg: Taiwan offered reassurances Monday it has sufficient water reserves to keep a giant tech industry led by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. humming till late May, when monsoon rains arrive to alleviate its worst drought in decades. The island should have enough water to supply the public and industry till then though precipitation is likely to fall short of average historical levels, Minister of Economic Affairs Wang Mei-hua told reporters Monday. The drought has so far exerted no impact on TSMC nor other companies, Wang added. Taiwan faces its worst drought in 56 years, a challenge to water-intensive sectors of the economy from chipmakers to textile factories and farms. The heightened level of concern coincides with a global shortage of semiconductors that's halting output at automakers from General Motors Co. to Volkswagen AG, spurring TSMC and its peers to run their fabs at close to full capacity to try and sate demand.

Spanning the Tropic of Cancer in the western Pacific Ocean, Taiwan typically receives copious amounts of rainfall. But last year was abnormally dry by historical standards. Hsinchu City, home to the likes of TSMC and MediaTek Inc., received just half the amount of rain in 2020 than it did the year before. The southern city of Tainan, another major center of technology manufacturing, also saw a significant drop-off in the amount of rain. Typhoons are usually an important source of precipitation but they didn't deliver for Taiwan last year. Not a single typhoon made landfall in all of 2020. Over the past century, the island is hit by between three and four typhoons each year on average, according to the island's Central Weather Bureau.

Reduced incidence of violent weather

[Latent Heat]

is evidence of climate disruption.

Just don't eat seafood in Taiwan in winter,

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

that's what the locals say. Especially if caught around Taichung, as it has swallowed all pollution that there is no water to wash into the ocean, and at high concentrations.

Re:Just don't eat seafood in Taiwan in winter,

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

What's "racist", you pathetic virtue-signalling cunt, the shrimp and the shellfish who inhabit the areas around the inlets of the low-running rivers washing away the poisons of the Taiwanese semiconductor industry into the sea? The very same inlets where most of the fishing for them takes place?

You race-baiting shitheads should be in prison for the hate crime of fanning the very same racism you're making a living from.

Re:

[Tablizer]

Americans eat stupid shit also. It's why our health is terrible.

Inflation

[awwshit]

Inflationary pressure

Re:

[Tablizer]

China is ahead of us in the invasion queue. Take a number.

Re: Australian Water Price

[Anonymouse Cowtard]

Let the Murray flow, mate. Gladys Bear-a-jerk-lyin, KoalaKiller in Chief should be first against the wall.

Re:

[inode_buddha]

I know this doesn't help, but as a USian I just *love* the slurs you guys use for your politicians, etc. So you have pols that jerk bears? LOL

Re:

[Arthur, KBE]

Was that a slur? I thought it was Welsh.

Re: Australian Water Price

[Anonymouse Cowtard]

Her surname is Berejiklian and I can't bear a jerk lying. It might catch on, I'm not certain. Usians don't do too bad at renaming their repss. My fave is Killary cos it goes so well with the conspiracies.

Re:

[mnemotronic]

What Google translation setting do I use for Aussie? I'm Forest Gumpers.

No beaches?

[rsilvergun]

You could just build desalinization plants. Yes, I know the run off can be problematic but a) there are solutions they just require effort and b) manufacturing's dirty anyway.

Re:

[ShanghaiBill]

You could just build desalinization plants.

Desalination is a terrible solution to water shortages.

The solution to Australia's water shortage is to stop growing wheat in the desert.

The solution to Taiwan's water shortage is to stop using flood irrigation to grow rice.

The solution to California's water shortage is to stop growing irrigated alfalfa in the Central Valley.

It is absurd to use gigawatts of energy just so we can continue to wastefully dump expensive water onto the dirt.

Re:

[ChrisIsTaken]

Water used by the Murray Darling Scheme doesn't flow to Melbourne, Perth or Sydney. We need to stop growing cotton under irrigation, but that's got more to do with increased soil salinity.

What Sydney and Melbourne need to do is recycle stormwater and sewage as grey water for agricultural, industrial, municipal, and garden use, but this can't happen because politicians only get under the table kickbacks when they engage in a billion dollar PPP with a large French/Belgian multinational. So instead we desal

Re: No beaches?

[e3m4n]

Or distillation. When I was on board the USS Arbraham Lincoln each of four distillation plant made 100,000 gallons per day. Thats 400,000 gpd in total. It did it using but a small fraction of its 550 thermal MW of reactor power.

Re:

[ChrisIsTaken]

During Sydney's highest water restrictions we were using 210L per capita per day. That's 300 million gallons.

We need to recycle sewage and storm water. We've know this for decades. For some reason small scale projects requiring interdepartmental cooperation never ever get built.

Re:

[belg4mit]

Not sure what you're on about, that's lower than rates in Boston:
https://www.bwsc.org/business-customers/rates/ [bwsc.org]; 1,000 ft3 is 28.3 stere (m3). They range from 2.12 to 2.86 USD, that's 2.76 to 3.72 AUD.

Maufacturing also need not be profligate with water. It is often possible to capture and filter waste process water for lower cost than dumping it and purchasing fresh, and can even be cheaper if the process requires high purity water in the first place.

Re:Australian Water Price

[Canberra1]

Poor bloody Boston then. You will note manufacturers have moved, mostly to where hydro electricity and water are cheap as inputs, as well as to new areas without unionized workplaces, or where they can in a bidding process win tax exceptions, and sometimes free capital. The so called global shortage was created by making manufacturing too expensive locally. Desal plants should be economic at 38cents litre. Town infrastructure costs should not be more. Then you have exceptions - like Cola companies sucking the water table dry, as in parts of India, and I believe Australia sells water to them at pennies, so everyone else subsidizes them. Interestingly in Australia the super high water and electricity costs means plastic recycling is uneconomical, so more goes to landfill (also because NIMBY dirty smelly recycling attitude). Plus like the UK, many towns have unsafe drinking water post privatisation, and the water is still the same price, even it it needs boiling first. https://www.abc.net.au/news/20... [abc.net.au]

Re:Australian Water Price

[Canberra1]

correction 38cents per cubic metre

Re:

[mnemotronic]

Water $2.40/cuM? In a desert? Shocking. And according to this, Australia is faring better than the US, job-wise [theconversation.com].

Re:

[nagora]

In Australia water costs in the city $2.40 per cubic metre or so,

That seems very cheap.

What you're saying is that if a chip required a ton of water to manufacture it would add $2.40 to the cost of that chip. Is the process so inefficient that it requires a ton of water per chip?

Re: remember the cloud seeding cannons?

[Anonymouse Cowtard]

Came here to postulate along those lines. China has been researching weather modification for over half a century.

Re:

[ChrisIsTaken]

Just to explain the sarcasm here, because it's subtle, the East Asian monsoonal flow is driven by water evaporated in the Indian and northern Pacific oceans.

Nothing China does to it's local weather will prevent hot humid air from condensing as it passes over Taiwan's Central Range.

Re: remember the cloud seeding cannons?

[IdanceNmyCar]

More than researching. Actively utilizing in mass currently understood methods.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

So all those stories about BTC miners

[rsilvergun]

making GPUs scarce aren't all that true. The shortages are apparently largely due to supply chain issues, and this is one of them.

Desalination

[brunes69]

Taiwan is surrounded by water, it just is not drinkable.

Why not set up some desalination plants & run them off solar? They are used with great success in the middle east.

Re:

[irateogle]

Having not read the article, I'm going to go ahead and assume it's not a long term issue so they're not going to invest the money right now. The middle east is just about always hot and sunny so it's a bit of a different scenario.

Re:

[clawsoon]

The article says that they're planning to build 11 water recycling plants. I assume from this that it's cheaper to clean up dirty freshwater than to desalinate ocean water.

Re:Desalination

[ShanghaiBill]

I assume from this that it's cheaper to clean up dirty freshwater than to desalinate ocean water.

It is cheaper, but the public is more willing to accept water extracted from the ocean than water extracted from sewage.

Re:

[Ed Tice]

In Taiwan, the economics favor cleaning up water even more since fuel for energy is all imported. But nobody in Taiwan drinks the tap water (even though its safe to do so). Water is bought in bottles with unknown provenance.

Re:

[ShanghaiBill]

Even Chinese people living in America refuse to drink the tap water and buy bottled water instead.

I know this because I live with one of them.

Re:

[del_diablo]

But for Taiwan reclaiming fertilizer might be more important in the long run than desalination, which is why its the build priority.
I assume you could do both with a recycling plant.

Re:

[ChrisIsTaken]

This is why Singapore uses grey water. It's an order of magnitude cheaper to run almost drinkable stormwater through a single stage of RO, than salt water through multiple chains that have to be periodically flushed.

In San Diego everyone screams about "toilet to tap". In Singapore LKY just says "Astronauts drink it. I'm drinking it. Shut up or we'll beat you."

Re:

[sjames]

Probably because they normally get plentiful rain. This year is their driest in 56 years and still they will likely get rain in time. Meanwhile desalination is expensive and takes a good while to set up. If they start now, the drought will likely be over before it can produce a drop of water.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

run them off solar

You are aware that Taiwan is a densely packed island that is unsurprisingly not interested in covering what little unpopulated land they have with silicon, correct?

Solar does not require unpopulated land.

[couchslug]

When Slashdot was News for Nerds that would have been obvious to the audience who were far less tech-ignorant.

Re:

[MrL0G1C]

If you were less tech ignorant then you'd know that you can get enough solar energy by putting panels on roofs. Seriously, how can you not have noticed that?

Re:Desalination

[Sleeping Kirby]

Hey, Taiwanese here in Taiwan. The government is doing a few things to cover their basis. Back up water pipelines from other regions, allowing drilling of wells and, yes, turning on a desalination plant. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/... [taiwannews.com.tw] From my understanding, desalination plants are expensive to operate and that's why more hasn't been built in the past. Also, I want to add, getting typhoons are a natural and regular thing here. Not getting typhoons is the indication of climate change for a tropical island. And it's not that we didn't get any typhoons in this region, it's that all the typhoons missed us and hit China. Hence all the flooding, ruined crops and the concern about their 3 gorges dam bowing from the water pressure.

Re:

[UnknowingFool]

The problem is totally solvable by more money and more capital in the future. However it is unlikely that multiple desalination plants can be installed and operational within a few months to ease Taiwan's immediate problems.

Re:

[Ed Tice]

Taiwan relies on imports for 98% of its energy (although it's still relatively cheap for some reason) so energy-intensive projects are probably not attractive.

Re:

[ShanghaiBill]

The question is whether building an intensive water using industry is the smart thing to do in a desert. Or should they put it somewhere else.

A typical semiconductor plant uses about 2 million gallons per day of ultra-pure water.

2 million gallons is about 6 acre-feet. In Arizona, water is sold to farmers for $122 per acre-foot.

So that is a total of $732.

Is that a good reason to shut down a billion-dollar industry that employs thousands?

Re: Building a fab plant in AZ.

[e3m4n]

Ok calling it ultra-pure just sounds weird. Its reserve feedwater. By definition its h2o and nothing else. Drinking it is actually very dangerous. The question is what happens to that 2million gallons when they are done rinsing the product? Surely it doesnt disappear. Does it just get dumped back into the ocean? If so then distillation makes more sense as there is no real concern over higher concentrations of brine since it will re-dillute from the run off.

Re:

[Tablizer]

California is about 2/3 desert also, and water battles are common.