Is there a reason the price of the water can’t be equal to marginal cost of getting more water, so the net effect of the data center is zero?
Water can be piped in from elsewhere, can be made from reverse osmosis from even briney aquifers or seawater or even sewage. Is this really an unsolvable problem or is it just a mispricing of the water? This makes me skeptical of stories like this.
Water is fungible. If they need to pipe in 1 gallon of water, who pays the extra cost? The entity that used the last gallon? The entity that used the most? Nah. It’s averaged out across all users.
You also cannot scale up these alternative sources at will. They need to be sustainably
commercially viable.
Wait, what? Utilities all over the world have rate systems that offer higher or lower prices based on who's paying. "Water is fungible" doesn't mean that you can't charge Amazon more for it than you do the little old lady down the street.
I'm not saying that the current rate systems in Mexico, or California, or XYZ place are perfect -- far from it! But there's no reason they couldn't be changed to fit society's goals.
And if it turns out that Amazon would still "win" the price fight over the people who lived there before Amazon came there, it's all good?
And who owns the water? Anyone with a plot of land who can access the watertable? Anyone with a plot of land next to a river? What about those downriver from that plot?
"Deregulation" is as meaningless as "defund the police". If you scratch the surface it can mean anything between total anarchy and "keep only this specific set of laws that I believe are good".
What's needed is regulation which promotes a wanted outcome.
I was responding to someone who made a joke about an obvious mispricing by the govt as being due to deregulation when it’s really the opposite.
As far as who owns the water, well for mineral water sources, I’d say the citizens do, and the best way to handle that is probably still to charge Amazon the same amount and then use the proceeds as tax revenue for the general welfare so the people don’t have to be so poor in the first place.
I call bullshit & shenanigans on this. Water is not money. A certain grade of crude oil can be fungible, but what about after it’s used?
There are many types of water: potable clean water being essential to human existence, but other less pure types can be used in agriculture and industrial applications.
Once water is used, or before it can be reused, processing and transportation is necessary, and that represents significant cost. The cost of processing or transporting money is negligible enough to make it really fungible and usable. Water is heavy, wet, and more volatile than that quarter in your pocket!
The existence of various grades of a commodity says nothing about whether that commodity at those grades is fungible. Mostly it implies the opposite, in fact.
But you can't then say unqualified that "water is fungible". Sewer water is not fungible with potable water. Greywater is not fungible with distilled or RO water. I'm not convinced that sewer water is fungible at all, considering its unknown content!
> the price of the water can’t be equal to marginal cost of getting more water
Increased demand by definition means consumers will pay more for the same quantity. Even if the marginal cost was flat it is in the producers interest to raise prices. You're essentially asking why markets have to do what markets do.
> Water can be piped in from elsewhere, can be made from reverse osmosis from even briney aquifers or seawater or even sewage.
Do you think that costs the same as pumping water out of a lake or water table?
> is it just a mispricing of the water?
...You think a drought is a mispricing of water? As if water was more expensive, there would be no shortage? A draught is a mis-cost of water; when water becomes more expensive than is sustainable.
Water can be piped in from elsewhere, can be made from reverse osmosis from even briney aquifers or seawater or even sewage. Is this really an unsolvable problem or is it just a mispricing of the water? This makes me skeptical of stories like this.