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Bill Gates Just Bought 25,000 Acres in the Arizona Desert (kgw.com)
What's the world's second-richest man up to now? A Phoenix news station reports:
One of Bill Gates' investment firms has spent $80 million to kickstart the development of a brand-new community in Arizona's far West Valley. The large plot of land is about 45 minutes west of downtown Phoenix off I-10 near Tonopah. The proposed community, made up of close to 25,000 acres of land, is called Belmont. According to Belmont Partners, a real estate investment group based in Arizona, the goal is to turn the land into its own "smart city."
"Belmont will create a forward-thinking community with a communication and infrastructure spine that embraces cutting-edge technology, designed around high-speed digital networks, data centers, new manufacturing technologies and distribution models, autonomous vehicles and autonomous logistics hubs," Belmont Partners said in a news release.
A former columnist for the Phoenix newspaper writes that "Unless Gates plans to turn the land into a preserve, he might want to know a few things that the locals didn't tell him..." First, Arizona doesn't have enough water to continue these kind of developments, no matter what the mouthpieces of the Real Estate Industrial Complex say... Second, climate change poses a clear and present danger to Arizona now. Summers are significantly hotter and lasting longer than a few decades ago. Massive wildfires are common, another new phenomenon. Whether Phoenix will even be inhabitable by mid-century is an open question. Already, it is a man-made environment totally dependent on electricity to power air conditioning and gasoline delivered by vulnerable pipelines. All of which make it questionable whether all the dreamed developments ever get built, much less last long.
"To be fair, wealthy people who were clever in one area -- especially tech -- often think they know a lot about everything," the columnist concludes. "If this is the case here, he might want to study up."
"Belmont will create a forward-thinking community with a communication and infrastructure spine that embraces cutting-edge technology, designed around high-speed digital networks, data centers, new manufacturing technologies and distribution models, autonomous vehicles and autonomous logistics hubs," Belmont Partners said in a news release.
A former columnist for the Phoenix newspaper writes that "Unless Gates plans to turn the land into a preserve, he might want to know a few things that the locals didn't tell him..." First, Arizona doesn't have enough water to continue these kind of developments, no matter what the mouthpieces of the Real Estate Industrial Complex say... Second, climate change poses a clear and present danger to Arizona now. Summers are significantly hotter and lasting longer than a few decades ago. Massive wildfires are common, another new phenomenon. Whether Phoenix will even be inhabitable by mid-century is an open question. Already, it is a man-made environment totally dependent on electricity to power air conditioning and gasoline delivered by vulnerable pipelines. All of which make it questionable whether all the dreamed developments ever get built, much less last long.
"To be fair, wealthy people who were clever in one area -- especially tech -- often think they know a lot about everything," the columnist concludes. "If this is the case here, he might want to study up."
I grew up in Arizona, and let me tell you, a couple decades ago it was HOT. Like, 122 F in Tucson and Phoenix was not unheard of. Now, it's fairly likely to hit that every year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti
Since the 1950s, people have thought that the cheap land could be tamed and "new ideas" would just blossom out of the goodness in people's hearts. Arcosanti is a great example, but not the only one. Last I saw the place, it had a gift shop where the hippy owners took money selling semi-erotic paintings and charcoal drawings, and invited the young folks to spend some quality time mixing concrete with desert sand... or pose for the artist. There's never going to be an Arcosanti the way it was originally envisioned, or even with a population over 10.
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According to Belmont Partners, a real estate investment group based in Arizona, the goal is to turn the land into its own "smart city."
I'm really interested in how they plan to deal with the water issue, it seems like a show-stopper. Maybe they can build something to recover water from the dry arid air - because otherwise they're going to have to pipe it in, and the Colorado River is already over used... They must have considered this issue when they bought the dry desert land...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
"Already, it is a man-made environment totally dependent on electricity to power air conditioning and gasoline delivered by vulnerable pipelines."
Those really aren't the issues if photovoltaic cells get as good as they are on course to. Will they even bother to go on the grid for electricity? The real issue is water.
The naysayment regarding water is dumb.
It is also dumb for another reason: 90% of the water in Phoenix goes to water lawns. So just build the new city without grass, and use xeriscaping instead. Problem solved.
They bought the land to develop because a big freeway is supposed to go right through the middle. They'll extort the state for a ton of money, make a huge amount of profit and then exit before the community is fully done. So the long term viability of the site is irrelevant.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Bill must think of the desert as an empty sandbox for him to play in, but there is a vibrant community already there in the plants and animals that have evolved to survive in the climate and terrain . Use the google, there's a website about it: https://www.desertusa.com/. What knowledge will be lost about the Anasazi and Sinagua people? I've walked on pre-Columbian trails where people migrated from the hot Colorado desert to the cool Laguna and Palomar mountains as the seasons changed.
Hahaha. Good luck.
First, one of the reasons Arizona is hot is because it is dry. There is less moisture to be had from the air than in, say, the Olympic Peninsula.
Solar stills are not very efficient in desert conditions. Their use as a method of even emergency survival in a desert area is discouraged because it takes more energy to build enough stills and time to build them than it is worth. You'll likely die of thirst in the interim.
To get anything like the amount of water for a large community, you would need large facilities and possibly more land area than the community itself.
"To be fair, wealthy people who were clever in one area -- especially tech -- often think they know a lot about everything,"
Unlike say columnists?
C'mon, I'm sure Bill didn't just smoke a blunt and decide to go build a new city in the desert. You can bet there's a ton of experts involved who have already thought about whatever it is Mr Columnist or Mr Forum poster thinks and then some. Because that's the thing with smart people, they think about all the things you think about, plus some more.
Why did we need this ignorant opinion in the summary? It only serves to dumb down the real story which could be something really interesting.
"First, Arizona doesn't have enough water to continue these kind of developments,"
Just if for some reason you want to have lawns around each house, that ship has sailed, not only in Arizona.
"Summers are significantly hotter and lasting longer than a few decades ago."
Great! The solar roofs on every house and garage will like that. That's one of the reasons they chose Arizona.
"Massive wildfires are common, another new phenomenon. "
That's why they chose the desert, with no trees, no fires.
"Already, it is a man-made environment totally dependent on electricity to power air conditioning "
Yes, great for solar and no heating in winter, what's not to like?
"and gasoline delivered by vulnerable pipelines."
Gasoline? This is new 21th century, nobody needs gasoline anymore. These people will drive Teslas, not F150s.
Look, Bill Gates can get a lot of things wrong, that much anyone can tell.
But quite frankly the smugness of the columnist is quite hillarious, on how stupid someone can be.
As if he's more equipped to know how Bill's investment will pan out from a very superficial reading, like in comparison to a guy who made his top 3 world fortune position out of a garage upstart and is currently driving one of the most effective and important foundations in the world. Smugness tied to ignorance, good way to show the entire world how much of an idiot you are.
With the sort or money and power Gates has, he can turn any desolate land into paradise. He could build a tropical paradise out of Antarctica. It's the sort of backing that made places like Las Vegas and Disney.
Climate change, massive wildfires, hotter summer? Does this guy even know who he's talking about? There's a whole range of ways to make the region profitable.
And even if he doesn't, people have to understand that the stuff Bill Gates invest on these days are not always running around profit.
You can hate his Microsoft years and whatnot all you want, and you can throw arguments about tax deductions and whatnot against his foundation all you want, the fact is that there's probably no one else in the world right now investing more on charitable causes. We're talking billions of dollars often on causes that will have no financial return.
People often don't realize how much he and his foundation did because most of the stuff it's currently investing on are ways to address basic health, hygiene and sanitation problems in the poorest countries, so we don't directly see results as much, but for certain regions in the world his contributions probably advanced things several decades in years time.
He's not the kinda guy who is gonna be worried about infrastructure problems in an arid region. He's the guy who has the best chances of finding out a way of solving such problems there, and then selling or sharing the knowledge to do the same to other parts of the world.
If Los Angeles could produce its own water by desalination, inland areas would be able to retain the water we are now sending them. But until that happens each state on the Colorado River gets a specific annual allocation of the water in it. The Phoenix metro area has a local supply of mountain drainage, but Arizona law requires that any new development prove out a 100-year supply of water before it can be built. Water is the limiting factor for any development in this state.
Energy will not be a problem. The area gets over 300 days of hard clean sunlight a year, and is next to a large nuclear plant. But Gates is going to have to change the name. There is already a Bellemont on I-40 in the mountains, a large new residential development near Flagstaff.
Everyone's got an argument where 'plenty of solar power' solves each of the myriad problems of living in a sun-baked desert. The far easier solution is not to live in a sun baked desert.
Location is still the most important consideration in sustainable development, because the annual energy cost of living is proportional to how far the temperature is from 70 oF. Everything after that is just mitigating the cost of the environment you've chosen. We could live in a comfortable area, or we could install a big power plant to make it comfortable. We could live somewhere with reliable access to clean water, or we could install a big power plant to harvest, purify, or import water. We could live somewhere with easy transportation, or we could install a big power plant to knock down mountains and catapult goods from 1000 miles away.
Just because your big power plant is solar, doesn't prevent it being wasteful.
Learning to live in new environs is what resourceful life does when it refuses to die and depopulate at the edge of the Petri dish.
If we cannot figure out how to live (and eventually thrive) in the earthly atmosphere of the Arizona desert with its excessive heat and limited water, off-planet settlements are the dreams that come from pipes.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Just put the desal plant on one of Arizona's coastal regions, then use the abundant solar power to run the pumps. Distance problem solved!
This settlement is 45 minutes outside of Phoenix, a city of population 1.6 million. And growing. Rapidly. All the critics here who are chorussing "oh, Gates is so stupid, he doesn't know that Arizona is uninhabitable" are silly: we already know it's possible because 1.6 million people already live there.
He merely needs to make a suburb that's somewhat more attractive than the other suburbs currently being built. And he can sell this to, not new people who had never thought of moving to Arizona, but some of the 81,000 people moving to the Phoenix area every year.
I know a place that condensed so much water from the air that in the end they flooded the entire place. There's a bad side to this story though, the place was full of warlords fighting for a spice of some kind.
#DeleteFacebook
A "smart" city would be one that's not built in a freakin' desert .
#DeleteFacebook
I found...
There's no shade.
There's no water (except at the golf courses)
All the plants have thorns
All the insects are venomous
All the animals are venomous
It's too hot to be outside for about 9 months of the year.
Everything about the place screams "humans do not belong here!", yet most of the population lives in the Valley of the Sun.
I guess that explains the voting record...
The DOE was created in 1977 - we did pretty well without it up until that time. Interesting to note, too, that the only nuclear power plant emergency we've had - Three Mile Island - happened after the creation of the DOE. Perhaps creating a big, overreaching, overarching Federal Department allows local/regional control to relax because "the Feds got it covered"...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
It is also dumb for another reason: 90% of the water in Phoenix goes to water lawns. So just build the new city without grass, and use xeriscaping instead. Problem solved.
Because people like their lawns, and their golf courses and fountains and ponds and swimming pools and daily showers.
It's the "I want it all" syndrome. Make the people exist in the actual environment, and with the actual amount of water that the environment provides, and the number of people that select to live there will plummet. Here in the green rainy northeast, we hardly think about water until it reaches flood stage.But that's why the predominant color is green. But it gets uncomfortably humid in the summer, and cold in the winter, so some folks want to move to the warm places. But they still want the good stuff which takes water. And they sure as hell don't want that 120 degree summer temperature, so they spend their days in the house using the swamp cooler. which takes water.
If the desert was easy for a lot of people to live in comfortably, there would be a lot of people living there already in the native conditions.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Given that when I lived in Tucson the house was cooled by evaporating water (they are called swamp coolers) and the house had no A/C, I just don't see squeezing enough water out of the air to be worth it even with free energy. I think it was like 6-8% relative humidity. There is a reason Tucson has a giant airfield for mothballing thousands of old Air Force planes.
"The DOE was created in 1977 - we did pretty well without it up until that time."
Sigh. Another fucking Libertarian cretin...
DOE was a reorganization of ERDA, which was a reorganization of the AEC. It raised some three decades of Nuclear Research to the Cabinet level, which was an extremely good thing. It also took most of the Weapons Delivery out of the Research side, and transferred it to the Cabinet level DOD.
Along the other ongoing realignments, the Nuclear Industry now reported to the NRC, which was not at Cabinet level.
DOE had nothing to do with the US Industrial mess that was Three Mile Island. The DOE shares some responsibility for some Research Reactors with the NRC, that's all.
Research Reactors and other aspects of Physics Research were not the only areas of DOE concern. It's the Department Of Energy, all Energy, you myopic mosquito. That includes Nuclear, Solar, Petrochemical/Coal, Wind, Renewable, and a few dozen things that you've never thought of and would never comprehend if you did. Yes, they inherited the responsibility for the Nation's Nuclear Stockpile, because frankly nobody else could be trusted with it. Oh, and it's no coincidence that DOD tilts Right, NRC is Business Friendly, and much of DOE tilts Left. Very bright people tend to be cautious Liberals, which is why Perry and his lapdogs wanted the DOE abolished, and because they are relative blundering idiots, had no idea what to replace it with.
Next Generation Reactors, whether Fission or Fusion, are still primarily the responsibility in the US of the DOE, because Industry has utterly failed here. I wish Terrapower well... but they've been around for a decade now and produced nothing but ideas, and in fact are currently surviving on DOE funding.
Should they get more funding? Perhaps. But that means giving the DOE more funding, which is anathema to the turd currently serving as DOE Secretary. He wants more money for Oil and Coal only.
The great lakes are polluted with mercury and other heavy elements used from wood harvesting and heavy industry. Effectively the equivalent of that green stuff from a Doom level.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Let's for the moment assume that me and the reporter are equally qualified to talk shit about science we both obviously don't understand. Then I'll chime in on what I can get from using common sense and maybe a little multidimensional thinking.
... from sand (if there is any sand for clear glass there) which will cause water to evaporate and then be caught on the top of the box and drip off the sides to be collected. The salt can be dumped into the desert as one option, it can also be gathered through maintenance (probably using low cost labor or robots). If using solar electricity, also keep in mind that it doesn't need to work 24/7. Instead of storing electricity, it can simple overproduce during the day and be stored as fresh water to be filtered for drinking after.
Solar and Wind - These two tools are really useful for solving power issues. They're not end-all solutions and large batteries in the desert will get hot and cooling them to a reliable operational level that don't leak constantly will require large air-conditioned facilities or at least massive underground storage. On the other hand, using it should be possible using Elon Musk's tech to build most internal walls of each climate controlled home and office to collect and store quite a bit of power without the need for large centralized facilities. A reliable automated method of washing roof tiles will be needed, but I imagine that sprinkler systems mounted on the roof should assist with this.
Niagra falls and the NYC aqueduct. This was accomplished originally in 1907 with technology from 1907... as a government project it was expanded substantially in 2015 and that was one of the biggest examples of government corruption in NY history... the land of the mafias... Those aqueducts have supplied tens of millions of people with water across a 262km stretch for over a hundred years. The issue is to bring water...not necessarily fresh, but simply water to the desert. It should be possible for Bill Gates to buy a "Boring Company" drill and get zoning to drill from the Gulf of California to his plot. Alternatively, he can lay an above ground pipe which might be more profitable. The reason is that using vacuum a heated pipe will start sucking water uphill without the assistance of pumps if the pipe is correctly designed. In addition, pumps will further assist. This can allow a large salt water reservoir to be established near/on his plot. Then the problem is desalination.
Desalination - The only real problem with desalination is the energy cost and salt disposal... which in a desert isn't overly problematic. One method is either to use solar electricity. An alternative is to build glass boxes
There is also ground water. Ground water is quite plentiful but difficult to access in the desert. Of course, this option debatable as there are many ground water problems in the desert. The most obvious is that as the water level decreased, the desert sinks too. This can be a nightmare for construction and infrastructure.
There are also many methods for extraction of water from the air. This is becoming more and more common in African deserts. Of course, the yield is low (at least on an urban scale) and dries out the environment further.
Purification generally requires power and filters. The most obvious filter which solves an economical problem as well is coal. I am no expert on chemistry and don't understand the process of producing the specific types of coal required for water purification, but I would imagine that this would increase demand for non-energy related coal.
Wildfires are always a problem in hot climates. So the solution for this is increase water, that means pumping more sea water in. The desert is a nightmare to make lakes in, but it's possible to do. On method is major concrete basins. Other methods could be to scorch the earth further to bring the sand closer to glass. I'm sure there are people far smarter than me who can come up with methods of building massive pools for salt and clean water
First of all, it isn't "Arizona's" west valley. It is the west valley of Phoenix, a city in the state of Arizona.
Secondly, in Tonopah there are massive aquifers (underground rivers essentially) and the water is very close to the surface. Makes it easier and cheaper to drill wells.
"Whether Phoenix will even be inhabitable by mid-century is an open question" - I think he meant habitable. In any case, lots of people are moving there. Minnesota in January - that's inhabitable.
"Already, it is a man-made environment totally dependent on electricity to power air conditioning and gasoline delivered by vulnerable pipelines." - That may be true now but Arizona is perfectly set up for solar and wind. The kind of city that Gates envisions is achievable.
Phoenix is expanding in basically two directions. Due west, towards Los Angeles. And north west towards Las Vegas. The east valley (Scottsdale, Chandler, Tempe) are basically built out. There is very little land left and what is left is very expensive. To the south, South Mountain effectively cuts off everything south of it from Phoenix making travel into Phoenix difficult. To the north you have the densely packed suburb of Anthem. Beyond that the only freeway (the I-17) goes down to two lanes. And there are Indian reservations hemming in the east valley. In fact, many of the big office towers in Scottsdale are built on land leased from Indian tribes. And they are never selling that land.
People in Scottsdale have traditionally looked down their noses at the west valley of Phoenix. But those are the only large parcels of land left. Jerry Colangelo, who used to own the Phoenix Suns basketball team, made a shit-load of money developing land in the west valley. As did a guy named John F. Long, whose family donated the land that the Arizona Cardinals stadium sits on today. They were buying up land at $5-10 dollars an acre. Today an acre of raw land - no house, no utilities, no water - will set you back about $100,000.
Gates knows exactly what he is doing.