Where's the Water, Waldo?

[RE]

A new thread for Water Woes Worldwide.

Desalinization:  A great solution to water shortage as long as the town is right on the coast, has plenty of money, gobs of surplus affordable electricity and you're not worried about fish, crabs or shrimp that coastal towns often have as a source of food and employment for the working class.

Oh, and don't forget those semi-permeable membranes with the 0.1 micrometer holes you force the salt water through under high pressure made from fossil fuel plastics which need regular replacement, or the pumps and their gaskets and pipes that get corroded by normally corrosive seawater on the way in and INCREDIBLY corrosive concentrated seawater on the way out you probably source from a factory in China.

For San Diego, CA, home of ecologically concerned citizens and the toughest EPA dept in the FSoA, the FSoA's largest desal plant does provide a whopping 10% of their water needs.  Technology to the rescue!

https://www.businessinsider.com/ocean-water-desalination-san-diego-us-drought-crisis-2023-10

San Diego temporarily solved its water crisis by turning ocean water into fresh water. But desalination won't work everywhere.



RE

[K-Dog]

Desal could never provide water on a scale agriculture needs.  But water needs to most people is filling a glass up.

[RE]

Desal could never provide water on a scale agriculture needs.  But water needs to most people is filling a glass up.

I'm all in favor of prepping with a personal desal pump like the ones they sell for Seasteads.  A definite prep you should buy to go with your 45' Ketch along with the solar pv panels to run it.



This is a must have for most low lying deserted atolls with no volcano.  You need that to collect rain from passing clouds.  Islands equipped with a volcano already have a population, generally now bigger than they can support.  Poor destinations when it becomes time to bugout.



RE

[RE]

I was already well aware of the electricity consumption pit of Bitcoin mining, however this is the first article I have run across that puts numbers to the absolutely ASTOUNDING consumption of WATER used for each Bitcoin transaction. It boggles the mind to comprehend that each time someone clicks the BUY button on a website and uses Bitcoin to pay for it, he is flushing a swimming pool worth of fresh water down the sewer to do it.  It's hard for me to grasp why these servers don't use the vast quantity of waste water coming from bath tubs or agricultural runoff for this.  Or closed loop radiator systems like ICE cars use.

This raises the question also as to how much water is used to run the ChatGPT3 servers each time you have it write 300 lines of code for a subroutine?  Not to mention the myriad of other applications AI is being thrown at.  Yet another reason the takeover of AI is not unstoppable.  Besides a shortage of power to run the computers, a shortage of water to keep them cool also will put a limit to its expansion.



https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cryptocurrency/each-bitcoin-transaction-consumes-4200-gallons-of-water-enough-to-fill-a-swimming-pool-and-could-potentially-cause-freshwater-shortages

Each Bitcoin transaction uses 4,200 gallons of water — enough to fill a swimming pool — and could potentially cause freshwater shortages

RE

[Knarf]

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the average US home uses about 7,200 kilowatt-hours of electricity each year 1. One kilowatt-hour is equal to the energy used to maintain one kilowatt of power for one hour 2. Therefore, 7,200 kilowatt-hours is equivalent to 7.2 megawatt-hours (MWh) per year.

To calculate the energy consumption of Bing per day, we need to divide the annual energy consumption by the number of days in a year. There are 365 days in a year, so the energy consumption of Bing per day is approximately 19.7 MWh (7,200 MWh / 365 days

[18hammers]

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the average US home uses about 7,200 kilowatt-hours of electricity each year 1. One kilowatt-hour is equal to the energy used to maintain one kilowatt of power for one hour 2. Therefore, 7,200 kilowatt-hours is equivalent to 7.2 megawatt-hours (MWh) per year.

To calculate the energy consumption of Bing per day, we need to divide the annual energy consumption by the number of days in a year. There are 365 days in a year, so the energy consumption of Bing per day is approximately 19.7 MWh (7,200 MWh / 365 days

Knarf, maybe it is just me but I do not understand your data.7,200 kilowatt hour a year is just that.I don't follow how you are saying it is equivalent to 7.2 megawatt-hrs? I am missing something?