SYRACUSE, N.Y. – Micron Technology’s sprawling chip-making complex in Clay would consume as much electricity as 2 million homes.
And the four fabrication plants, or fabs, would have a combined roof area of more than 100 acres.
So this question has popped up at public meetings: Why doesn’t Micron install solar panels on the expansive roofs of the fabs?
“There would be 5 million square feet of roof surfaces in the four buildings that would be available for rooftop solar,” noted Peter Wirth, vice president of Climate Change Awareness and Action, at a public meeting last year.
It’s not that easy, Micron says. Solar panels present an array of potential problems when installed on fabs, which are filled with sensitive and expensive machinery.
And even if Micron covered every square inch of those fab roofs with solar panels, they would produce only a miniscule fraction of the complex’s enormous energy demands.
Micron says it does plan to put solar panels on rooftops in Clay, but only on non-manufacturing buildings. The Clay complex would also include offices, utility buildings and parking garages.
Top company officials have said panels won’t be installed on fab roofs, however.
“Due to the risk of leaks, snow load, and roofing system designs to manage vibration, rooftop solar panels are not currently incorporated into the design for manufacturing building rooftops,” Beth Elroy, Micron’s vice president for global environmental health and sustainability, wrote to local environmentalists after meeting with them in November.
Last month, Carson Henry, Micron’s senior director of strategic U.S. expansion, confirmed that the company doesn’t plan to put solar on the fabs. Panels on roofs could create vibration that would interfere with fab machines, Henry said March 19 at the annual conference of the Central New York Air & Waste Management Association, according to two people who attended.
Fabs are highly automated, relying on machines that can cost up to $500 million each. The machines, called tools, transform pizza-sized silicon wafers into tiny computer chips. A speck of dust or drop of water can ruin a wafer, and the machines are so sensitive to vibration that the concrete floors beneath them can be several feet thick.
An earthquake that struck Taiwan April 3 reduced Micron’s production of its flagship memory chips “of up to a mid-single digit percentage,” even though Micron’s major fab there is on the other side of the island. Micron owns $13 billion worth of buildings and machines in Taiwan, more than in any other country, according to the company’s 2023 annual report.
Micron, which pledges to use 100% renewable electricity in all of its U.S. facilities by 2025, is no stranger to solar power. In Singapore, where Micron operates a fab, the company installed 36,000 solar panels. That’s enough to power 6,000 homes, Micron said.
Micron said in a statement last week that some of the Singapore panels would be attached to fab roofs, but did not clarify why that can’t be done in Syracuse.
Solar power, however, is far more effective in Singapore: The sun’s energy is 400 times greater there than in Syracuse. That’s because the island nation of Singapore lies just 90 miles from the direct sunlight of the equator. Syracuse is 3,000 miles from the equator.
At Micron’s headquarters in Boise, Idaho, which lies at about the same latitude as Syracuse, the company recently made a deal with Idaho Power to build a 40-megawatt solar farm.
In Clay, Micron says it would consume 16 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. That’s enough to power the states of Vermont and New Hampshire combined.
The number of solar panels needed to create that much energy would be staggering: It would require a solar farm five times the size of the city of Syracuse.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
