Taylor is an ideal place for a large manufacturing operation since it's close to major highways and railroads, not too far from Austin, and land is very cheap.
*was
I'm between Taylor and Austin (Bagdad Rd, Leander). 1 acre lots along this strip have gone from ~$115k a year ago, to some recent sales at ~325k.
If you watch local news reporting, it's hilarious that they (politicians) have no idea what the "factory" does. I'm personally highly doubtful that a fab which hasn't broken ground will be producing viable 5nm at the 2H of 2024 as claimed (or cyber trucks for that matter).
Do you have some examples of this?
Or, in general: https://www.texastribune.org/2017/08/09/are-business-ties-be...
Billion dollar "public/private" investments turn in to boondoggles except for those who retire as lobbyists or foreign firms who pick up the pieces of the bankruptcy.
For anyone wondering, this is a unit of energy (100 nJ):
Maybe people consider the grid distinct from all the supporting infrastructure.
https://www.ferc.gov/media/february-2021-cold-weather-outage...
Of course they said a bunch of things and made a bunch of recommendations the last time ERCOT fucked up, and they didn't listen to nearly any of them, so I would expect the same this time.
Apparently natural gas isn't easy to store, so basically there's not a lot of buffer, and everything needs to stay online or there won't be any natural gas to burn at power plants even if they were winterized, which some of them were.
I think some power plants may have even just shut down because natural gas was available but too expensive, and they weren't under a legal obligation to keep producing electricity.
Point being, to solve the problem, winterization of plants is just part of the problem.
By your own source that's 50% higher electricity dependence for heat than the U.S. average.
But no, I was not talking about the upper latitudes of Texas where freezing weather and snow is quite common and gas heaters are more prevalent.
Of course, if the fans are electric, then the gas heat doesn’t help.
In that case, you better hope you have a gas fireplace.
Which was also a problem of not winterizing.
The picture of the entire event is that the government of Texas flagrantly ignored what it was told was the problem from the previous blackout, and then naturally the exact same problem caused the next one.
2014. After the event the government was advised that winterizing the powerplants needed to be done to prevent similar events in the future.
Instead, Texas did nothing for another 7 years, and then the same thing happened again.
This was wholly predictable: Texas running an independent grid doesn't have enough power import capacity to manage long-tail events, but also chose to manage them by ignoring them and damn the consequences - those consequences being Texan citizens froze to death in their homes (https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/19/texas-power-outage-w...).
Not close to being entirely a wind power issue. (Even though wind power could clearly have done better, as it did in Iowa, where it was significantly colder and the wind turbines stayed online.)
Over half the turbines were completely frozen. Wind typically accounts for ~22% of Texas power supply. Meanwhile, there was a record high spike (nearly double normal loads) in demand for electricity. If not for natural gas, the blackouts would have been even worse, because at least they were able to be ramped up and provide some power via rolling blackouts.
Natural Gas, Coal, and Nuclear accounted for over 80% of the lost generation. Most of that was gas.
See page 16 here: https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2021/04/28/ERCOT_Winter_Sto...
Same thing happened in both 2011 and 1989… NatGas was not there when the state needed it most.
They didn’t do as well as they should have, but they did a lot better than expected.
(MidAmerican did pay extra for winterization, so you can maybe make the argument that it wasn't worth it for TX to have done the same, given the risk profile.)
No, it was the gas-fired power plants that didn’t have enough gas to burn, caused by the fact that many of the gas producers had not winterized their systems, and in fact some of the gas producers got their own power turned off in the rolling blackouts — they hadn’t been marked as mission critical.
Try reading the report.
Sadly, very little has changed since February. The producers and the gas power plants have paid a trivial fee that allows them to choose not to winterize (because that would be too expensive), and so far as I know they still haven’t even bothered to mark those systems as mission critical, so when the rolling blackouts happen again, they’ll get their power cut off again.
https://www.theverge.com/21507966/foxconn-empty-factories-wi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_in_Wisconsin?wprov=sft...
It would be much harder to find evidence of fair dealing from ERCOT.
I can't imagine Samsung would put a plant in a 3rd world country like Texas unless they were getting significant tax deferrals from the state.
Samsung for years has had a major facility outside of Austin.
Samsung Austin Semiconductor https://goo.gl/maps/nX9BFxHoVMCVKBLL7
And ERCOT is also based outside of Austin.
Austin is also the state capital, centrally located & home of one of the nations largest universities (UT), who has a strong engineering & CS program graduating thousands of students per year.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that major companies have a significant presence in or around Austin.
Taylor was chosen because that area (northeast of Austin, just south of Taylor) is one of the last areas near Austin that has abundant amounts of wide open fields ready to be developed. They also got a good deal on the water usage, and of course the tax breaks from Williamson County.
My understanding is when you cross east past round rock towards Hutto/Taylor, the water aquifer being used changes to use water piped over from Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer.
In my experience (former firefighter here), it absolutely does. It also varies by call type, time of day, etc. So if we got a call at 2:00 AM and there was no traffic on the road near the station, we might leave the station with no siren out of respect for the people trying to sleep in the homes very close to the station. This would be more true if the call was a lower priority call in the first place. OTOH though, if the call as "residential structure fire with occupants reported trapped" our focus would not be on sleeping neighbors and there's a better chance that we'd be getting on the Q pretty much right out the door.
Another factor for us was that our station was right next to an intersection that was very busy at times, and known for many traffic accidents. So any call where we had to turn left (towards the intersection) out of the parking lot, there was a better chance we'd be hitting the siren and air-horn pretty much right from the jump.
Anyway, yeah, net-net, this is going to vary based on lots of factors: department policy / culture, geography, time, traffic, etc, yadda yadda.
Q?
My main concern would be all of the communications equipment they typically have. Being that close to high powered transmitters can cause annoying interference.
I know I would attempt one. Try nice and some charm and see what comes of it. May end up popular with neighbors.
You will always see the flashing lights but they have never blasted the sirens at night.
Other things which are bothersome about a firehouse…
• They put the communications radio on some sort of loud speaker sometimes, so you get to listen to all the calls in the city.
• They have some sort of turbine that runs a lot. Maybe a hose dryer? I haven't gone to ask, but when I used to do audio recordings there were days we couldn't record because of it.
• Their backup generator optimizes efficiency by minimizing the muffler. The tests are pretty loud.
• The building department made me block up the windows on their side because I was too close to the property line and a fire might spread to the fire station. I say if the fire department can't keep fire from coming out my window and setting fire to their building 60 feet away, that's at least partly their fault. :-)
• They are a multi-tier bureaucracy. When their tree slowly fell over on to my building it took many months to get them to admit it was their tree and maybe they should cut it down. Lots of finger pointing between the fire department and various city levels and a few "dead parrot" conversations with different functionaries.
So do large grocery stores, for obvious reasons.
But power came back quickly, because I was on the same trunk as the fire station.
There have been literally hundreds of other grid disasters in New York, Chicago, the entire state of California, and yet no one would be surprised if the plant showed up there. Why?
Companies that are planning new nuclear units are currently indicating that the total costs (including escalation and financing costs) will be in the range of $5,500/kW to $8,100/kW or between $6 billion and $9 billion for each 1,100 MW plant.
Because operating a nuclear reactor is a whole different thing, than operating a chip plant and you usually want to focus your energy, not spread it out. And when the goal is, to just have blackout save energy for your chip plant, then there are way cheaper, riskfree and faster solutions, like batteries, or gas generators.
This site does a pretty good job: https://sfciti.org/sf-tech-exodus/
Article from the SF Chronicle: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Austin-COVID-tec...
Hopefully that addresses your question as to why I hold this opinion.
According to wikipedia/some google-fu SV has just above double the high tech jobs as Austin
Uh, maybe it's time to take a drive through Austin, but that was a pretty sleepy little college town 10 years ago. Most of my family lives in the central Texas region (San Antonio, San Carlos, College Station), and I presently live in Mountain View. I have a hard time believing SF-scale infrastructure was built that fast.
As an example, here's the UT wind tunnel: http://research.ae.utexas.edu/floimlab/Mach5.php
Here's the Moffett wind tunnel complex: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/multimedia/images/2005/nfa...
Not quite what you were asking about but it does deal with the TX grid.
[0] https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/the-bay-area-beyond-rank...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/14/silicon-valleys-share-of-ven...
Running an entire leading edge semiconductor plant on battery backup is a crazy proposition in my view. Especially, for intentions of surviving another Texas winter situation without any disruption to operations. Approximately 24 hours of full-coverage battery backup would have been required to bridge the rolling blackouts.
Last I checked (about a decade ago), the SAS A2/S2 lines accounted for ~13% of the electrical load for the entire city of Austin. Just look at the amount of power one EUV light source requires today. These lines will have potentially dozens moving forward. Then consider that all of the photo area accounts for a tiny fraction of total power consumption in one of these plants.
If it were even remotely feasible for the Samsung semiconductor lines to operate on standby generator power, they would have installed these units already and no losses would have been incurred.
They might as well be smelting aluminum behind those walls. Any backup generator power or UPS devices are designed for life safety and stopping the line without causing 10+ figure losses. You cannot run one of these facilities on in-house power. Another commenter proposed a nuclear reactor installation. This is actually not a terrible idea once you understand the scale. Putting 10-15 semiconductor lines around a nuke plant makes perfect sense to me.