State-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) yesterday held a groundbreaking ceremony for a new solar power plant at the Changhua Coastal Industrial Park (彰濱工業區), with company officials saying they expect the plant to start operations before the end of the year at the earliest,
The facility, with an installed capacity of 100 megawatts, would be capable of generating 130 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, supplying power to more than 30,000 households, Taipower said in a statement.
The 150-hectare site, which was originally set to house a coal-fired power plant, will be transformed into the nation’s largest ground-mounted solar system, it said.
It would be the world’s 54th-largest solar plant, it said.
Batteries and equipment at the site would all be made by Taiwanese companies, Taipower chairman Yang Wei-fuu (楊偉甫) said, adding that the Changhua plant would be benchmark power project for the nation.
Electricity generated by the plant would mainly be used to supply power domestically, Yang said, but added that the government is open to the idea of selling the “green” power to foreign companies.
Besides installing 339,000 solar panels at the site, Taipower is also building step-up substations at the site to store electricity generated from offshore wind farms along Changhua’s coast.
Capital expenditure for the Changhua project is expected to reach nearly NT$6.2 billion (US$211 million), Taipower said.
The company said it has awarded the contract to Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), which has undertaken more than 400 solar power projects nationwide.
Given its geographical advantages, Changhua County’s solar power industry last year produced more than 200 million kilowatt-hours of electricity, contributing nearly 15 percent to the nation’s total solar power generation, Taipower data showed.
Apart from Changhua, Taipower said it is planning to build a solar power plant in Tainan, with an installed capacity of 150 megawatts.
Construction of the Tainan plant is to begin in the middle of this year, Taipower said.
The solar power projects are in line with the company’s plan to accelerate the development of renewable energy in the nation and meet the government’s goal of phasing out nuclear power by 2025, Taipower said.
On Wednesday, Danish energy company Orsted A/S announced that it is teaming up with several Taiwanese firms to invest between NT$50 million and NT$200 million to build a 1-megawatt energy storage facility Changhua, the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported.
HORMUZ ISSUE: The US president said he expected crude prices to drop at the end of the war, which he called a ‘minor excursion’ that could continue ‘for a little while’ The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait started reducing oil production, as the near-closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz ripples through energy markets and affects global supply. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is “managing offshore production levels to address storage requirements,” the company said in a statement, without giving details. Kuwait Petroleum Corp said it was lowering production at its oil fields and refineries after “Iranian threats against safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.” The war in the Middle East has all but closed Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the open seas,
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
PROJECTION: TSMC said it expects strong growth this year, with revenue in US dollars projected to grow by about 30 percent, outperforming the industry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday reported consolidated sales last month reached NT$317.66 billion (US$9.98 billion), the highest ever for the month of February, driven by robust demand for chips built using the company’s advanced 3-nanometer (3nm) process. Last month’s figure was up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, but fell 20.8 percent from January, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. For the first two months of the year, TSMC posted cumulative sales of NT$718.91 billion, up 29.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts attributed the growth to sustained global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products
RSS