Water-rich Switzerland controls Western Europe’s taps — and wants it to stay that way. Its drought-ridden neighbors are getting nervous.

Water-rich Switzerland controls Western Europe’s taps — and wants it to stay that way. Its drought-ridden neighbors are getting nervous.

At the western edge of Lake Geneva, where the mighty Rhône river squeezes through a narrow dam, a blunder of French diplomacy is carved into stone for all to see.

The inscription, mounted on the walls of an old industrial building, commemorates the 1884 accord between three Swiss cantons that have regulated the water levels of this vast Alpine lake ever since. It does not mention France — even though some 40 percent of the lake is French territory.

“France, for some reason, wasn’t part of the contract,” said Jérôme Barras as he unlocked a gate below the epigraph to inspect a hydropower plant under the dam he has managed for more than a decade.

When the agreement was renewed and a new dam was built a century later, Paris still wasn’t interested.

The French government now regrets that.

…

And France has suddenly realized it can’t control that tap as it battles water shortages, destructive droughts and baking heat.

  • talEnglish
    3·
    7 months ago

    I think for the US, the structure of the city is also a factor.

    This is painting with a broad brush, but:

    American cities tend to have a very high-density core that has offices and stores and such, and are surrounded by a lot of low-density housing.

    European cities tend to have a medium-density, about four stories, across the city.

    That’s a function of the fact that a lot of the US was constructed after the invention of the elevator (which allows for taller building heights to be practical; historically, top floors were undesirable) and the automobile (which allows for lower-density housing to be practical). There are few skyscrapers in Europe; Turkey actually has the most, by a huge margin, and like the US, Turkey saw a lot of population growth in the 20th century, so a lot of Turkey is gonna be new-build.

    I spent a while looking at the few US district heating systems that existed in the past (and a few, now). They don’t do the suburbs – they provided heating to that high-density city core. There, they don’t have to run pipes a long distance to transport heat; electricity is cheaper to transport than heat.

    There are exceptions that do provide district heating to residences, like Manhattan, but Manhattan is also a (partial) exception to the “high-density core, low-density suburbs” structure; New York City, though the largest American city, doesn’t look much like a typical American city:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system

    https://streeteasy.com/blog/steam-heat-in-new-york-city-explainer/

    New York’s first steam system was installed in 1881 in response to a need for an underground system immune to the elements. Now, New York has over 105 miles of steam piping serving nearly 2,000 buildings — it’s the largest steam system in the world, by a massive margin.

    But for the general case, I expect that it’s gonna make less economic sense to do district heating of housing in the US than in Europe.