Taiwan has completed the replacement of all 696,700 incandescent traffic lights around the country with light-emitting diode (LED) signals this year, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.
It makes Taiwan the second country after Singapore to have shifted entirely to LED traffic lights, according to officials at the Bureau of Energy.
The officials said LED lights consume 85 percent less energy than incandescent traffic signals, meaning the new lights should help the country save 247 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year.
The LED lighting project is set to be expanded next year to include the replacement of mercury-vapor streetlights, the officials said.
Since the energy conservation campaign was launched, the government has issued more than 166 million “energy labels” to products with conservation features, the officials said, adding that the program has helped the country save the equivalent of 122,000 kiloliters of oil a year and it has reduced carbon emissions by 310,000 tonnes a year.
In the first three quarters of this year, energy intensity dropped 6.92 percent from the same period last year, the biggest improvement in any year with economic growth over the past two decades, they said.
So far, 20 business groups have signed a voluntary energy conservation agreement, with the goal of decreasing energy consumption by 5 percent, or 14 million kilowatt-hours, over a three-year period until 2013, the officials said.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last