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.
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.