They have it, but not enough, probably because they would need a lot more.
From the comments of the article:
"Korean media has coverage of this.
Battery powered emergency power did kick in. However, some areas had to be shut down because of the amount of power that battery power can cover.
Stuff that cannot be shut down were kept operational.
Not all the wafers will be thrown away. They are checking which are safe to use.
Maximum damage is estimated at about $50 million."
More like a case for on site power generation. Semiconductor fabs consume enormous amounts of power. Would be difficult to handle with energy storage systems, as least with today's technology.
I was insinuating Tesla Powerpacks, similar to the Hornsdale Power Reserve.
EDIT: After doing more digging and seeing how much power the facility requires, energy storage is definitely not an option. They'd need their own natural gas turbine on site and redundant transformers (a transformer failed).
There's a row of new(ish) datacenters in Santa Clara (Silicon Valley) where there used to be a row of fabs -- because a large amount of power infrastructure was already available after the fabs were torn town.
All of these datacenters use energy storage to tide themselves over power failures.
Why is it that energe storage works for datacenters but not for fabs?
Sure, but, do they need to keep producing at peak when there is a power outage?
You must have a plan to ramp down to a steady state of consumption that keeps things safe. Even if they need many megawatts, the 50 million in damages figure quoted elsewhere buys a hell of a lot of generators.
My layperson's understanding of the furnaces producing silicon ingots is that they can't power down in-process; best case, they take weeks to bring back into service, while the worst case is serious damage to the equipment as the silicon inside recrystallizes.
I wonder if it's even possible to ramp down this single process without a similar hit to productivity as an uncontrolled power loss, never mind the other stages in the fab process. If not, fabs can consume tens of megawatts, so what does it cost to build and maintain the necessary backup generation capacity to weather a 30-minute outage?
> so what does it cost to build and maintain the necessary backup generation capacity to weather a 30-minute outage?
Tesla's install at the Hornsdale Power Reserve [1] is 129 MW of storage capable of discharging at 100MW. This could supply power for far more than 30 minutes if an outage occurs. Estimated cost is $50 million, which appears to be roughly the same cost as this manufacturing failure, so there's a middle ground to be found.
By energy storage, I assume you mean the energy stored in diesel, and released when combusted and used to turn a generator. If you are referring to batteries, do you have any links? I would be really interested to learn more about large scale datacenters that are using something other than diesel/natural gas for backup power.
I'm mystified why you think energy storage is only diesel. Any datacenter-focused energy storage resource you'd find on the web doesn't mention diesel for short-term storage. Batteries and flywheels are the most popular. Diesel is a medium-term solution.
I've never bought capacity at a datacenter which only had diesel backup. It simply doesn't start fast enough for short-term capacity.
When I read the comment about energy storage, I was thinking for longer term backup power of greater than 60 seconds of runtime.
You are correct, that it takes some time, usually about 10 seconds for a diesel generator to come online and provide the power. That power gap is traditionally provided by a UPS (which can be chemical (battery), kinetic (flywheel), or some other short term power supply).
Again, my interest is diesel alternatives that are being developed and deployed in large scale datacenters.
I used to work at a datacenter that had all the usual elements. ATS, UPS, Caterpillar genset. It's all quite interesting.
Ah. Well, one up-and-coming alternative is Bloom Energy fuel cells, which run on natural gas, and are supposedly inexpensive enough producing energy that it's reasonable to use them as "peaker" power production. I've never seen any numbers for them, though.
I mean, it's sort of silly to locate your data centers where you can't use on site renewable generation, no? If you're going to put a datacenter somewhere due to low land costs, but still meets your user latency requirements (speed of light), if you can generate onsite with solar and meet your consumption needs, and battery back it, and have utility power, you don't need large diesel gensets for battery backup (gensets that are rarely used but depreciating constantly).
Apple built a 200MW solar farm to power its Reno, NV datacenter. It also built a 50MW solar power plant on 300 acres in Florence, Ariz., which is used to power its Mesa data center. They use 100% renewables to power all of their data centers.
