Semiconductor History | 寶山第二水庫, 寶山鄉 — Below Ten Per Cent, and Who Got Cut First

A wafer fab rinses silicon over and over in water purified until it is aggressive enough to strip metal, and it cannot do that intermittently. 寶山第二水庫 in 寶山鄉, 新竹縣 is the reservoir that keeps 新竹科學園區 supplied. On 5 April 2021 a senior official at the park administration put its storage below ten per cent of capacity. Taiwan was in its driest year since 1964. Not one typhoon had made landfall during 2020, the first time in fifty-six years, and typhoons are how this island's reservoirs get filled. What followed is worth recording precisely, because it was a sequence of decisions rather than an accident. Irrigation was suspended first. Through December 2020 and into January 2021 the 農委會 confirmed first-crop 停灌 across 嘉南, 台中, 苗栗, 新竹 and finally 桃園: roughly 74,000 hectares, close to a quarter of the island's 310,000 hectares of irrigated land. Farmers were compensated at NT$93,000 per hectare for planting green manure or approved alternative crops, and NT$82,000 for ploughing under. Households came second. More than a million households and businesses in 台中, 苗栗 and northern 彰化 went onto five days of supply followed by two days without, starting 6 April 2021. The science parks came third, and were asked for reductions rather than stoppages, on the order of fifteen per cent. A further seventeen per cent was scheduled for 新竹 and 台中 from 1 June and then shelved when the plum rains arrived. 台積電 reported no impact on production and bought tanker-truck water for some fabs. The numbers underneath explain the ranking. 台積電's Hsinchu operations drew about 57,000 cubic metres a day in 2019, against roughly 140,000 for the entire park, and the four 2-nanometre fabs then in environmental review were projected to add 120,000 more. The fabs are not the island's largest consumer of water. They are its least interruptible one, and when the rain fails, the interruption gets moved onto farmland. Recovery was slow. The reservoir was still only around thirty per cent full in June 2021, after the monsoon had already begun. The photograph shows the dam, its intake tower and the service road, with the drawdown line legible along the banks. Photo: Peellden, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.