All of these datacenters use energy storage to tide themselves over power failures.
Why is it that energe storage works for datacenters but not for fabs?
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.
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?
One interesting example: USD $1.5 million for 10MW of flywheel-based backup capacity (http://ir.p10industries.com/news-releases/news-release-detai...) - but these will last ~15 seconds under full load.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Wind_Farm#Hornsdale_...
Flywheels are an alternative for battery backups. They are used to give enough time for generators to come online and stabilize.
I mean, it's sort of silly to locate your data centers where you can't use on site renewable generation, no? If you're going to put a datacenter somewhere due to low land costs, but still meets your user latency requirements (speed of light), if you can generate onsite with solar and meet your consumption needs, and battery back it, and have utility power, you don't need large diesel gensets for battery backup (gensets that are rarely used but depreciating constantly).
Apple built a 200MW solar farm to power its Reno, NV datacenter. It also built a 50MW solar power plant on 300 acres in Florence, Ariz., which is used to power its Mesa data center. They use 100% renewables to power all of their data centers.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3161732/sustainable-it...
And in manufacturing, Tesla is covering the entire roof of Gigafactory 1 with solar. It can be done.
I've never bought capacity at a datacenter which only had diesel backup. It simply doesn't start fast enough for short-term capacity.
You are correct, that it takes some time, usually about 10 seconds for a diesel generator to come online and provide the power. That power gap is traditionally provided by a UPS (which can be chemical (battery), kinetic (flywheel), or some other short term power supply).
Again, my interest is diesel alternatives that are being developed and deployed in large scale datacenters.
I used to work at a datacenter that had all the usual elements. ATS, UPS, Caterpillar genset. It's all quite interesting.