|
My previous job had several substations dedicated to the facility. I'm not sure if it was redundancy or simply to meet demand (#1 consumer of power, water, electricity, and gas in the county).
It takes up to several days to grow a silicon ingot, and losing power would scrap anything growing, causing contracts to miss their deadlines, not to mention backlogging other contracts on machines already near 100% utilization. Making up for lost production isn't as simple as having people work overtime for an operation that is already 24/7/365
The only way to make up for missed production is to maintain an inventory of product from surplus production capacity during periods where less than full production is required. I bet that inventory has been used up already given this chip shortage situation.
|