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Page added on August 3, 2011
You can’t size your infrastructure for the outliers
Yesterday’s post about recurring suggestion that we build giant water infrastructure was premised in part on this year’s extremely wet year on the Missouri-Mississippi system, the “Why not build a big pipe from there to the desert” argument. As I mention, I hear this idea a lot, but especially this year, when it seems like there’s so much extra water over there that those folks don’t need.
OtPR nailed the problem with this argument in a post yesterday: “If you build for the peak, most of the time you’ll have excess capacity.” The case study at hand in OtPR’s post is a farmer who expanded to take advantage of this year’s extremely wet year, buying a bunch of extra equipment to put 500 marginal acres into production growing tomatoes:
But if Mr. Coburn bought a new tractor and harvester to support his most marginal 500 acres of land, he is so fucking stupid he deserves to lose his farm. Mr. Coburn knows from the past two years that he doesn’t get water for that acreage every year. How many wet years does he need to amortize $2M worth of equipment on 500 acres? Right now he’s burdened those 500 acres with $4,000 per acre worth of machinery, because in the wettest year in recent memory, he got some surplus water?
That argument applies across scales. If you build dams and canals capable of handling the big floods on the Mississippi, saving it and sending it to the arid West, most of the time they won’t be useful, because most of the time they’ll be empty. There are a whole lot of reasons I think the idea is a non-starter. This is one of them.
2 Comments on "You can’t size your infrastructure for the outliers"
Mike on Wed, 3rd Aug 2011 4:19 pm
Overbuilt is called Performance.
Have you checked your computer CPU monitor? Typically, 10% usage, then a spike to 100%.
Looked under your hood?
300 hp V6 Mustangs?
How about your house, in this cause UNDER Built for Winter weather, Under built for summer weather.
I think ultimately it’s called: SALES.
DC on Wed, 3rd Aug 2011 5:38 pm
To put it even more simply, gluts just dont last. We ran into this a little while back. The captital region had water resrictions(very hot-no rain), eveyone bitched and moaned of course. Then we got lucky and a little while later, resevoirs were full, but the restrictions were still mostly left in place. This is of course, enraged people even more. Because the city knew people were wasteful, our ‘surplus’ would be gone in no time, so they held off.
This was the wise thing to do.
Now, I had to explain to several people that just because the water resovoir was full *now* did not mean it would magically remain that way esp. in the face of un-restricted water use. Most of them nodded dully like this was the 1st time they had heard the idea. But what was interesting was as soon as people heard the world ‘full’ it was lets turn on the taps! If water were oil in this case, my fellow citizens would have all thrown there bikes in the water, and run out and all bought 6000 SUVs…..