Thursday, March 3rd 2022
90-minute Power Outage in Taiwan Threatens Chip Manufacturing
A major power-outage affected regions of Taiwan with semiconductor manufacturing bases, earlier this morning (March 3, 2022). A malfunction with a power-station caused a sudden drop in power-generation, triggering power-grid failures, and resulting in blackouts lasting around 90 minutes. This may not seem like much, but for a semiconductor manufacturing facility with limited power back-up and time-critical and power-critical processes, 90 minutes is an eternity.
Taiwan News reports that a Taipower plant in Kaohsiung suffered a malfunction with steam leaks in the turbine room, triggering an emergency shutdown. This caused a 10.5 MW drop in supply. Such sudden supply-demand changes can cause AC frequency to fall out of the safe range, and transmission equipment in switch-yards are designed to automatically trip (to protect end-user equipment). A cascading power outage was seen in Wenshan District, Neihu District, Da'an District, and Xinyi District. In New Taipei City, Yonghe District, Banqiao District, and New Taipei Industrial Park. Various semiconductor-manufacturing companies are yet to report how this power-loss affected them.
Update 07:02 UTC: In the wake of this power-outage, major semiconductor companies put out their initial assessments of how this affected them.
Sources:
Taiwan News, ChinaTimes
Taiwan News reports that a Taipower plant in Kaohsiung suffered a malfunction with steam leaks in the turbine room, triggering an emergency shutdown. This caused a 10.5 MW drop in supply. Such sudden supply-demand changes can cause AC frequency to fall out of the safe range, and transmission equipment in switch-yards are designed to automatically trip (to protect end-user equipment). A cascading power outage was seen in Wenshan District, Neihu District, Da'an District, and Xinyi District. In New Taipei City, Yonghe District, Banqiao District, and New Taipei Industrial Park. Various semiconductor-manufacturing companies are yet to report how this power-loss affected them.
- TSMC said it faced no outage, there was a manageable effect on the UMC plant in Nanke. Some TSMC plants experienced a voltage drop lasting 400 to 1000 ms, and the company is assessing how this impacts them. Factory equipment at UMC Nanke plant is affected, but restarted. TSMC stressed that the impact on its production should be negligible
- Display panel maker Innolux faced a voltage drop or shutdown, and the company is assessing its impact. The company was running on back-up generators.
- Yageo Kaohsiung, which makes passive components said that it faced an outage, which was supported by back-up power. Its production line isn't as sensitive to outages as silicon fabrication
- DRAM makers Nanya and Winbond report no impact
- PCB manufacturers Taihong, HannStar etc., located in the Kaohsiung area, report plant shutdowns due to the outage, and "slight" wastages. The company is sitting on enough inventory to cover the shortfall
- Zhengwei Tucheng with makes power connectors, lost power for 1.5 hours, but the production line wasn't affected. Connectors are low-tech items.
- Nanzi Science and Technology Park, an SEZ housing many companies reported a power outages.
41 Comments on 90-minute Power Outage in Taiwan Threatens Chip Manufacturing
It still is absolutely flabbergasting to me these multi-billion dollar facilities don't have uninterruptible power. I know there are some limitations in space for such sub-systems, but in the US, even Casinos often have backup power.
TSMC has invested heavily in their own solar panels, but even that might not be enough.
Three years ago, TSMC alone, used close to 5% of Taiwans available electricity.
There was also reports recently that they've bought up close to 100% of all renewable electricity being produced in Taiwan.
esg.tsmc.com/en/update/greenManufacturing/caseStudy/37/index.html
focustaiwan.tw/business/202202180014
tw.stock.yahoo.com/news/%E5%85%A8%E5%8F%B0%E5%A4%A7%E5%81%9C%E9%9B%BB-%E5%8F%B0%E7%A9%8D%E9%9B%BB%E8%AD%89%E5%AF%A6%EF%BC%9A%E9%83%A8%E5%88%86%E5%BB%A0%E5%8D%80%E5%8F%97%E5%A3%93%E9%99%8D%E5%BD%B1%E9%9F%BF-040134955.html
If they're using that much of the nation's power generation capacity, and contributes so greatly to the nation's economy, don't you think it worthwhile of a 'mega engineering' project?
The problem is probably not that of an insurmountable technical challenge. Rather, that
every power outageevery interruption these manufacturers have experienced, haveallowedprompted the possibility of increased pricing.In the end, their goal is to make money, producing stuff just happens to help them do that, sometimes.
... if they go down because of power then it's actually a win for them, they become more scare, have reasons to raise prices etc.
Did you forget to unplug your iron again?
I don't think any nation has this, so claiming that Taiwan should have this is a bit silly to be honest.
Yes, they have some kind of redundancy, but the redundant systems don't always respond quickly enough, as it depends on how the outage happens.
In the 15 years since I moved to Taiwan, this was by far the longest power outage I've experienced here, but it mostly affected residential areas.Actually, for the foundry companies, a power outage is a disaster, as they lose output, which they have to reimburse their customers for, so no, this is not a positive thing if you're a foundry business.Nah, I tripped over this.
So you think I should cheer on the people that are expecting prices to go up, when nothing actually happened? :kookoo:
And FYI, I have my fair share of criticism of this island and I would rather not ever work for a Taiwanese company again, but I'm also not into spreading BS about things that never happened.
I don't know where you live, but if something was reported in the news that was either lacking information or was untrue, would you not comment on it?
Management will be getting sacked pretty quickly if they don't!
It's simply not possible to have proper redundancy for something like this.
Just a quick check and looks like 50MW UPS is quite possible to get with relative ease if you can pay for it of course!