terafab

The link complains that I am using an ad blocker.

Burning natural gas is a more expensive way of generating electric power than relying of solar panels. The solar panels are intermittent sources so you do have to back them up with batteries, and Musk could buy in some of those nice blade cells from BYD in China. Or he could use his own rather more primitive cells.

The implication is that Musk is nuts, but he's close to Donald Trump so that pretty much goes without saying. Trump's derangement probably isn't contagious - he just attracts other nut-cases.

Musk should build a nuclear power plant It is green. Better for the people and climate. Cheaper 'trickety too.

Oh and he could use the stuff to make some nukes for in his satellites? Ooops... Well is obvious anyways...

Elon is indeed crazy, in a good sort of way.

I know a guy who knows him, drove prototype Teslas around with him [1]. He likes Elon.

One that has more or less worked, so far. As with Trump, it has worked better for Elon than the rest of the world.

One of my friends is maniac depressive. It took forty years before I got got to hear about the formal diagnosis, but I always knew he was nuts. It didn't stop him patenting a better version of the confocal microscope, and making a lot of money out of it, but he is still nuts, if perfectly likeable.

Actually not cheaper.The precautions you need to take to make it safe for the next 100,000 years aren't cheap either.

Nuclear plants are useful sources of all kinds of short-lived isotope, as well a whole bunch of isotopes that just dangerous.

Bill Sloman snipped-for-privacy@IEEE.org wrote: |--------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"One of my friends is maniac depressive. It took forty years before I got | | got to hear about the formal diagnosis, but I always knew he was nuts. | |It didn't stop him patenting a better version of the confocal | |microscope, and making a lot of money out of it, but he is still nuts, | |if perfectly likeable." | |--------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Doctor Sloman,

Thanks. This is interesting. My Ph.D. supervisrix (also in optics) was diagnosed by a psychiatrist as being mentally ill. (S.

Of course. What would you expect a psychiatrist would say?

Jeroen Belleman

Jeroen Belleman snipped-for-privacy@nospam.please wrote: |-------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"> Thanks. This is interesting. My Ph.D. supervisrix (also in optics) was| |> diagnosed by a psychiatrist as being mentally ill. | |> (S.

:)

(S.

He's in a big hurry.

AI Summary of why gas is the way to go in this instance.

1. Real Estate Footprint (The 7.6 GW Problem) Semiconductor fabs operate at near-100% capacity utilization rates and require massive, continuous baseload power. To generate enough electricity to consistently power an industrial footprint expected to eventually span 100 million square feet, a solar array would require roughly 8,000 to 10,000+ acres ( > 15 aq miles) of open land. Gas turbines pack gigawatts of power into a fraction of that physical space.

1. Speed to Market vs. Grid Timelines Connecting a multi-gigawatt solar-and-battery array to a regional grid or building it independently requires immense regulatory, environmental, and infrastructure lead times. By utilizing on-site natural gas generators (mirroring the power structure SpaceX's xAI subsidiary deployed in Memphis), Terafab can bypass standard ERCOT queue wait times and deploy manufacturing tools much faster.

2. Zero-Tolerance for Intermittency Even minor millisecond power fluctuations can ruin an entire production batch of high-end AI logic and vehicle chips. Natural gas generators offer dispatchable power—meaning they can be ramped up or down precisely on demand—whereas solar relies entirely on the weather and the rapid cycling of giant battery blocks to maintain perfect voltage stability.

And grasps at what looks like the easiest solution.

That's a problem that transmission line solve, and have been solving for more than a century. It's not the simplest thing to set up, but neither are the long term reliable natural gas supplies for gas turbines.

Cheating always saves time, until somebody notices.

Battery blocks are the ideal source of stable power. Salesmen claiming that they can ramp up their gas-turbine generators rapidly to come close are simply lying. If you believe them, you are a gullible idiot.

Providing enough renewable generation capacity to keep the batteries reliably charged to an adequate level means that some of it is going to sit idle for a lot of the time, but mostly you can sell that unused output to the grid via your battery bank at a time when they can use it.

There are a few things about the technologies being employed that you are not aware of. As for the gas supply, the proposed fab is only 40 miles from Houston, an ultra-humongous petrochemical processing hub. The new plant is obviously tapping into existing pipelines on their way to or from Houston. This is my guess; I don't know it to be an absolute fact. Anything that involves land acquisition in the U.S., such as acquiring right of way for a transmission line, can easily become a very expensive and multi-year project in the U.S. It's something to be avoided like the plague. Modern gas generator technology is absolutely space-age compared to what you've been used to. AI summary: Yes, many modern gas generators use AC-DC-AC conversion (often called inverter technology) to efficiently manage rapid load fluctuations. By decoupling engine speed from the electrical output frequency, these systems allow the engine to throttle down during low demand and speed up instantly when demand spikes, saving fuel and reducing wear. Benefits for Load Agility Variable Engine Speed: The engine only runs as fast as the current load requires, rather than running at maximum speed at all times.Instantaneous Response: Electronic inverters adapt to sudden electrical spikes in milliseconds, long before the mechanical engine physically speeds up. Clean Power Quality: The resulting AC power has a pure sine wave with minimal total harmonic distortion (THD), making it safe for sensitive electronics. Fuel Efficiency: Operating at lower RPMs during low-demand periods significantly reduces fuel consumption and exhaust emissions. End Summary

The description of the fab states they are using battery banks for whatever reason, probably to enhance the generator response, dunno. The facility will probably generate a continuous 200 MW, 24/7 365 days per annum minimum. It sounds like a lot, but we're talking Texas here. ERCOT generation is peaking near 100 GW during the hot weather, which is all the time there. 200 MW is only 0.2GW, and considering approximately half ERCOT power is derived from gas, the Terrafab consumption is insignificant.

You're not going to do better than what's planned.

How many more days per year does it do at maximum?

A gas pipeline moves a lot of energy, compared to an electrical transmission line.

And it stores a lot of energy as a bonus.

Generate electricity close to the point of use.

It might at the moment. When it gets to be worth the investment high-temperature super-conductor transmission lines will wipe the floor with them.

Which somebody has to pay for while it is in transit.

Until you get super-conducting transmission lines.

"It's the technology of the future, and always will be."

The industry is positively manic and non-stop.

AI summary

Extreme Financial Investments: Building a modern mega-fab costs upward of $10 billion to $20 billion. The specialized equipment, such as ASML extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems, depreciates rapidly. Companies like TSMC, Intel, and GlobalFoundries must run production non-stop to maximize yield and recoup their investments.

Long and Sensitive Production Cycles: Manufacturing a single silicon wafer from start to finish takes up to 12 to 26 weeks and involves thousands of sequential steps. If production stops midway, entire batches of highly sensitive wafers can be ruined.

Redundant Utilities: To prevent accidental blackouts, fabs are connected to highly stable power grids, often supported by massive uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and backup industrial generators. A brief half-hour power loss can stall production for days and cost millions of dollars

Maintaining Cleanroom Environments: Fabs operate under strict "cleanroom" conditions where temperature, humidity, and air particles are tightly controlled. Shutting down and restarting the massive HVAC and filtration systems takes too much time and risks contaminating the environment.

Chemical and Tool Stability: Many chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and etching tools must remain at precise operating temperatures or under vacuum pressures. Powering them down can cause thermal stress, component damage, or calibration drift.

As a prophet, John Larkin doesn't have much of a track record. The line is usually applied to nuclear fusion, and ignores the fact that we've been relying nuclear fusion going on some 93 million miles away for the past few billion years.

My guess is that somebody will eventually comes up with a workable super-conducting transmission line, but probably not before John Larkin has dropped dead - the shock of being proved wrong probably wouldn't kill him. He's used to it.

Twaddle.The margins are high and there isn't a lot of competition. They do try to run non-stop, to maximise the return on their massive investments, but there isn't a lot of competition around to undercut them.

But probably won't be. If the stop is managed, rather than imposed by an earthquake or a lightning strike, batch can just be delayed.

If were totally unexpected it might. Massive uninterruptible powers supplies do give you the time to hold up processing on the batch in progress until you can be confident that it is safe to resume processing.

Which is why you have uninterruptible power supplies and back-up generators. Wafer's being processed get shifted around and stored between processing step in in totally sealed transfer containers. And they can stay sealed indefinitely without power. If they are picky about their thermal environment it gets trickier, but maintaining thermally insulated environments at a constant temperature isn't all that expensive or demanding.

But they have to be shut down from time to time for maintenance anyway. Coping with emergency shutdowns is standard operating procedure.