Untapped offshore wind is luring Japan’s biggest commodity houses to invest in projects in Taiwan and at home, buoyed by favorable government policies that support development of the clean power.
Mitsui & Co this month bought a stake in Taiwanese wind developer Yushan Energy Co (玉山能源) that gives the Tokyo-based company a 20 percent stake in a 300-megawatt (MW) offshore project that might cost US$1.8 billion to develop.
Mitsubishi Corp is working with partners to build a separate wind farm venture off Taiwan’s coast and Marubeni Corp is developing two offshore projects in the northern Japanese prefecture of Akita.
“Asia is at the dawn of development of its offshore wind market,” Yoshio Kometani, chief operating officer of Mitsui’s infrastructure projects business unit, said in an e-mail. “Taiwan is especially promising as it has favorable natural conditions and the government is taking initiative to improve investment and development opportunities.”
Buffeted by strong breezes in the Taiwan Strait, the island has emerged as a hot spot for clean power projects as President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) works to phase out nuclear energy while adding 25 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy by 2025.
Taiwan is seeking to boost offshore wind capacity to 5.5GW over the same timeframe, from just 8MW.
In Japan, the government is working on legislation that standardizes offshore wind development guidelines and streamline the approval process for new projects. The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in March updated its offshore wind map with more data on conditions and the agency is accelerating the environmental impact assessment process.
Globally, there are about 18GW of offshore wind capacity and Europe accounts for more than 80 percent of that, with the rest mostly in Asia, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
Asia is expected to add 3.5GW of offshore wind capacity in 2030, more than double the 1.5GW to be added in Europe the same year, according to estimates in a report from BNEF in December last year.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) revenue jumped 48 percent last month, underscoring how electronics firms scrambled to acquire essential components before global tariffs took effect. The main chipmaker for Apple Inc and Nvidia Corp reported monthly sales of NT$349.6 billion (US$11.6 billion). That compares with the average analysts’ estimate for a 38 percent rise in second-quarter revenue. US President Donald Trump’s trade war is prompting economists to retool GDP forecasts worldwide, casting doubt over the outlook for everything from iPhone demand to computing and datacenter construction. However, TSMC — a barometer for global tech spending given its central role in the
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
PRESSURE EXPECTED: The appreciation of the NT dollar reflected expectations that Washington would press Taiwan to boost its currency against the US dollar, dealers said Taiwan’s export-oriented semiconductor and auto part manufacturers are expecting their margins to be affected by large foreign exchange losses as the New Taiwan dollar continued to appreciate sharply against the US dollar yesterday. Among major semiconductor manufacturers, ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光), the world’s largest integrated circuit (IC) packaging and testing services provider, said that whenever the NT dollar rises NT$1 against the greenback, its gross margin is cut by about 1.5 percent. The NT dollar traded as strong as NT$29.59 per US dollar before trimming gains to close NT$0.919, or 2.96 percent, higher at NT$30.145 yesterday in Taipei trading
RSS