How Much Energy Will New Semiconductor Factories Burn Through in the US? (theverge.com) 41
A new report warns that a boom in computer chip manufacturing in the US could fuel demand for dirty energy, despite companies' environmental claims. The solution for manufacturers, surprisingly, might be to act more like other big tech companies chasing climate goals. From a report: New semiconductor factories being built in the US by four of the biggest manufacturers -- Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and Micron -- could use more than twice as much electricity as the city of Seattle once they're operational. These companies claim to run on renewable energy, but according to an analysis by nonprofit Stand.earth, that's not entirely true. Semiconductors happen to make up a big chunk of a device's carbon footprint. And unless companies turn to clean energy, they could wind up driving up greenhouse gas emissions as domestic chip manufacturing makes a comeback.
The CHIPS and Science Act, which passed in 2022, set aside $52.7 billion in funding for domestic chip manufacturing. Now, the four companies scrutinized in the report have plans to build megafactories in Arizona, Ohio, Oregon, Idaho, Texas, and New York. Each of those megafactories alone could use as much electricity as a medium-sized town, according to the report. Cumulatively, nine facilities could eventually add 2.1 gigawatts in new electricity demand. "We're not slowing down on any of our sustainability commitments, even with our recently announced investments," Intel said in an email.
The CHIPS and Science Act, which passed in 2022, set aside $52.7 billion in funding for domestic chip manufacturing. Now, the four companies scrutinized in the report have plans to build megafactories in Arizona, Ohio, Oregon, Idaho, Texas, and New York. Each of those megafactories alone could use as much electricity as a medium-sized town, according to the report. Cumulatively, nine facilities could eventually add 2.1 gigawatts in new electricity demand. "We're not slowing down on any of our sustainability commitments, even with our recently announced investments," Intel said in an email.
Re:To those who would have us live like sheep (Score:4, Insightful)
Living is dirty, messy business
You're absolutely 100% correct, life is a dirty messy affair - that's why you have a societal obligation to clean up after yourself.
and no amount of paint-throwing, street-blocking and tantrum-throwing will change this.
Unfortunately some people just want to make a mess without cleaning it up later, so the rest of us throw tantrums and block streets in an effort to force them to. Just because life is a dirty messy affair, it doesn't absolve you of your responsibility to clean up after yourself.
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And by doing so, make yourself and your cause fringe lunatics and undermining any legitimate point you may have had.
Judean Peoples Crack Suicide Team.
Re: To those who would have us live like sheep (Score:2)
If you're more angry at someone who makes your commute longer than the rich fucks profiting from the destruction of the biosphere then your deserve to die mad about it.
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Re: To those who would have us live like sheep (Score:2)
I don't need to make demands, I just write the comments I want to write and then it happens. Maybe someday it will happen for you too, but I doubt it.
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Living is dirty, messy business
You're absolutely 100% correct, life is a dirty messy affair - that's why you have a societal obligation to clean up after yourself.
Bravo. You are also 100% right. However, sending work off abroad knowing that it will be cheaper because they won't clean up is just as bad. Where the same environmental protections aren't imposed abroad then there should be tariffs on imports and the money from those tariffs should be used to subsidize the cleaner products so that consumers don't suffer from them overall.
Irony and lack of introspection (Score:3)
There's simply nothing stupider than a so-called environmentalist who is outraged that some productive person or enterprise is not cleaning up some mess sufficiently (a mess that was a natural consequence of making something people needed/wanted) and who then expressed that outrage by taking a manufactured thing like soup or paint (both MANUFACTURED, and both of which produced messes in their manufacture) and splashing it onto a building or a piece of art (a 100% waste of the substance which was manufacture
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You're either a manufacturer, or a consumer. The United States shifted from one to the other and it hasn't worked out, has it? We need to get back to manufacturing. Service economies are not sustainable, ours has been showing cracks for decades now.
On what basis do you think a manufacturing based economy is more sustainable than a service based economy? On the contrary, the further up the food chain an economy is the more sustainable it is. Economies based primarily on raw goods like food and minerals are the least sustainable, followed by manufacturing based economies and then service based economies. Each level of economic activity represents a higher value-add than the last.
This is why successful developing economies try hard to insulate local manu
service economy fallacy (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no such thing as a "service economy". The idea of a "service economy" is the sort of crap that rich globalists peddle to ignorant fools as the super-rich export good middle-class manufacturing jobs to 3rd world countries in order to maximize profits by using slave- or near-slave-labor and evading environmental and safety laws.
You cannot possibly HAVE a service economy where there's no gathering of raw materials, no processing of raw materials, and no manufacturing because a so-called "service economy" is completely dependent upon energy and physical products that were manufactured SOMEWHERE from SOMETHING using lots of ENERGY. The energy production, the harvesting of raw materials, processing of raw materials, manufacturing of components and assembly of products are all going to have to happen SOMEWHERE. You cannot have people entering data at computers if the computers do not exist or if they are not powered. You cannot have people preparing and serving food if the food does not exist and there's no energy to heat/cool/prep it. You cannot have people cleaning buildings if the buildings and cleaning products do not exist. Medical people cannot provide healthcare if the buildings, medical equipment, medications, medical supplies, and energy are not present.
Any functional economy will have manufacturing, including nasty, dirty, toxic, dangerous manufacturing. We are in the real world, not some TV Sci-Fi Star Trek fantasyland. Making stuff requires nasty stuff like acids and oils and produces nasty stuff like sharp metal shavings, gritty debris, toxic chemicals, decomposing materials, etc. Trying to avoid this by shipping all the dirty stuff to the other side of the planet so you do not see it and can play "make believe", pretending it's not happening is supremely childish and ultimately actually counter-productive because environmental impacts on the globe will be worse if the dirty stuff is done in places with fewer rules.
Re: To those who would have us live like sheep (Score:2)
I am interest in the long term survival of my descendants.
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The thing is, you can do all this very cleanly, it's called nuclear power. But those same people also rail against that to the point they are making it much more expensive than it has to be. Amazon just bought a datacenter for well under $1B with a big nuke attached to it, yet somehow the government can't get it done for $50B because of those idiots.
If you want your cake and eat it, go nuclear.
Only stupid people try not to use energy (Score:4, Insightful)
What matters is how you produce it, not how much you use. Stop trying to scare people with idiot bait like "Each of those megafactories alone could use as much electricity as a medium-sized town".
Re:Only stupid people try not to use energy (Score:4, Funny)
So you're saying it's not the size that counts, but how you use it?
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What matters is how you produce it, not how much you use.
Since quality of life for a nation/region tends to increase with energy use I would think it does matter how much energy we use. Of course how efficiently that energy is used matters, we'd see more improvement of quality of life if we put heat into an insulated structure than just huddling around an open flame. We can't conserve our way to zero energy use, and yet that is apparently what is being demanded from us by the global warming alarmist.
I will agree that if all else is equal then the largest concer
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Only stupid people try not to use energy
But the intelligent recognize that energy efficiency processes are important and often overlooked because of "economics".
Oh FFS (Score:2)
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This argument never works on NIMBY.
Having lived next to an industrial plant that was a cancer cluster right here in the good old US, when I was a young child, I can't even blame them that much. Both my grandparents died of lung cancer after living next to of all things, a Maxwell House coffee plant and breathing in the crap they'd been spewing for half a century. Sure, we're better now, but the nature of industry and inefficacy of regulation in the US doesn't exactly fill me with a warm fuzzy, and it's ce
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True enough, just look at the rare earth runoff dumped into rivers in China. If you complain, you get disappeared. The true price of "green" technology...
Another way to pose the question (Score:2)
The way I would pose the question is; What value would be created as a result of the energy used?
Given that there would be people working at the facility and chips being manufactured that would be sold, it would most likely make sense to use that energy to help create useful items such as integrated circuits.
It makes more sense to me to use it for that as opposed to using the energy to power virtual currency farms because most people have little use for a string of ones and zeros.
Industry requires energy (Score:4, Insightful)
Any industrial activity requires energy. This is a good use for such energy. On the opposite side we have bitcoin mining, which is (mostly) wasting energy.
The headline seems to imply that this is a bad thing. Just build the factories and the (nuclear!) power plants, dammit.
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Nuclear is no longer feasible. (Score:2)
Droughts due to climate crisis we're in makes nuclear, being just another steam engine, unreliable, inefficient and too expensive.
And that's when it is already heavily subsidized by the government - as it needs to be in order to be profitable.
Which the companies running the existing reactors know very well - cause they're the same ones running coal and gas plants... and the renewables.
Only one of their energy sources allows them to get something for free and sell it to their customer at a cost - and it's no
Uh no (Score:5, Insightful)
A new report warns that a boom in computer chip manufacturing in the US could fuel demand for dirty energy
They don't care where the energy comes from, which is a real problem, but it is not the same thing as demanding "dirty energy".
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but it is not the same thing as demanding "dirty energy"
Nor is it the same thing as demanding "slutty energy" which can be confused with "dirty energy".
How Much Energy (Score:2)
same amount that it would be used in China, with the added negative of benefiting Chinese economy vs US. so please IMBY
Who gives a shit. (Score:1)
When you have crap like bitcoin wasting energy, why are they even looking at semiconductors which actually add value to GDP vs bitcoin which is the equivalent of just throwing resources into a boiler to burn.
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When you have crap like bitcoin wasting energy, why are they even looking at semiconductors which actually add value to GDP vs bitcoin which is the equivalent of just throwing resources into a boiler to burn.
A boiler contains water at the bottom and steam at the top, I don't think anything would easily burn in a boiler. /s
Re: Energy isn't "burned" (Score:2)
It exits the atmosphere as infrared radiation and moves away from us at the speed of light. We'll never catch it nor will we likely beable to observe it again. That is as good as destroyed.
SMNR? (Score:2)
These factories sound like the perfect customers for Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) [wikipedia.org].
Re: SMNR? (Score:1)
Why, are they fucking idiots stupid enough to Believe that shit will work out and somehow reduce costs?
Do you want the chips or not? (Score:2)
Equivalent to Seattle? (Score:2)
That seems...implausible, especially if Seattle has any sort of industrial capacity or data centers. I only rarely go to Seattle so I have no feel for it.
I'd be truly surprised if it was even within two orders of magnitude. TFA didn't cite any sources so it's difficult to say.
To keep this nerdy, does anyone know where semiconductor manufacturing uses power? I know growing the silicon ingots uses a ton of juice. I don't know that any of the downstream steps use a ton of power, not compared to other industria
How Much Energy Would it Use In Another Country? (Score:2)