Simulation of a green wafer fab featuring solar photovoltaic technology and storage system

A semiconductor wafer fab requires a significant amount of energy to maintain its daily operations. Solar photovoltaics (PV) is a clean and renewable technology that can be potentially used to power large wafer fabs. There exist some critical factors slowing the proliferation of facilities powered by PVs, including high capital costs and power output intermittency. This study investigates the reliability and the costs of operating a PV-based distributed generation (DG) system to generate renewable energy for wafer fabs. In addition to PVs, the DG system also features storage devices and a net metering function. We developed a simulation model to mimic the PV generation and load variability. The goal is to design a reliable and cost-effective PV-based DG system to mitigate carbon emissions. Two case studies are presented in this paper to demonstrate the performance of the proposed DG system for fabs located in Austin Texas, USA, and Dresden, Germany.