Operational planning of distributed energy generation for a semiconductor fabrication plant

Abstract

The semiconductor industry is well known for its high resource consumption due to its clean room usage and power-intensive manufacturing technology. This is a significant financial burden for semiconductor fabrication plant owners who wish to minimize the cost needed to cover the electricity and gas loads for their daily operations. From a historical perspective, those electricity and gas cost reductions have been enabled by more energy-efficient manufacturing technologies. Due to the complexity of factors influencing the energy system of a semiconductor plant, other aspects have often been neglected and also not been studied intensively in the academic literature so far. One possibility for reducing energy costs is the integration of a microgrid as on-site distributed energy resources (DER) may offer a less cost-intensive way to supply the energy needed. Therefore, this paper seeks to answer the following research question: How much expected cost can be saved and risk mitigated at a semiconductor fabrication plant via DER? More precisely, in this paper, a microgrid at a semiconductor fabrication plant that has installed DER with combined heat and power (CHP) applications and demand response (DR) is used to simulate the expected annual energy costs under given uncertain electricity and gas prices at different installed capacity levels. A simulation-based approach is used to evaluate several DER capacity sizes. The results of the simulation show that installations of DER at a semiconductor microgrid can dominate the base case of doing nothing, considering the expected minimized cost, the expected CO2 emissions, and conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). In fact, DER can reduce the expected annual energy bill by up to 6%, whereas annual expected CO2 emissions can even be reduced by up to 22%. Moreover, with DER, a microgrid’s risk is reduced as it can react to market conditions and local demand. Additionally, the true potential of microgrid cost savings can only be enabled when DR is allowed and proves particularly effective when energy prices are more volatile.