Taiwan’s cities are experiencing serious air pollution, largely because 35 percent of the nation’s electricity is generated from coal. Faced with a wave of public protest, several coal-fired power stations have responded by cutting their outputs.
This year’s autumn is unusually hot and the Central Weather Bureau has said that temperatures have hit a 70-year high.
Warmer weather means more use of air conditioning. If the base-load electricity supply from coal-fired power plants is reduced under such conditions, it might lead to more power outages.
This situation calls for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to temporarily drop its call for a non-nuclear homeland and restart nuclear power plants, which provide base-load power without causing air pollution, killing two birds with one stone by resolving the environmental and electricity supply problems.
As an economy grows, power demand also grows. If coal-fired generation is reduced from current levels and we scrap nuclear plants, which provide base-load power without polluting the air, it will be bad not only for the environment, but also for the stability of electricity supply.
This is especially true considering that nuclear power is generated cleanly and cheaply and does not require maintaining emergency stocks of fuel.
Pending an environmental impact assessment, the site for the nation’s third liquefied natural gas terminal has yet to be decided. The DPP’s nuclear-free homeland plan aims to generate 50 percent of electricity at gas-fired power plants within the coming eight years. Given the delay, this will be hard to achieve.
Without an ample supply of electricity, the measures that Premier William Lai (賴清德) has announced in response to the “five industrial shortages” — labor, skilled professionals, electricity, water and land — will merely be empty words.
For example, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co plans to build a 3-nanometer chip plant in Tainan, which would boost its electricity demand by 21 gigawatt-hours, or 85 percent, within the next 10 years. If electricity supply develops along current lines, TSMC will pack up and leave Taiwan.
It took 18 years to build the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮) at a cost of NT$283.8 billion (US$9.45 billion at the current exchange rate). Three years ago, construction was halted under the government’s nuclear-free homeland policy, and Taiwan Power Co has had to spend NT$3.4 billion per year to keep the plant in mothballs. That is a big waste of taxpayers’ money.
The power plant’s installed capacity is 2.7 gigawatts (GW). If it were to start operations with a utilization rate of 90 percent and operate throughout the year for a total of 7,880 hours, it would generate 21.276 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity, which equals 8 percent of Taiwan’s total power generation of 264.114TWh last year.
Based on Taiwan’s electricity emission factor for last year of 0.529kg of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour, generating that amount of electricity from the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant would cut emissions by 11.3 million tonnes, which is 4.4 percent of the total 258.17 million tonnes of emissions that Taiwan produced last year.
The nations’s four nuclear power plants, with their total capacity of 7.844GW, could generate 61.811TWh per year, or 23.4 percent of all electricity, and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 32.8 million tonnes, or 12.7 percent of the total.
The DPP should consider suspending its nuclear-free homeland policy, which is bad for both economic development and environmental protection.
Lu Shyi-min is a retired energy policy researcher at the Industrial Technology Research Institute’s Green Energy and Environment Laboratories.
Translated by Julian Clegg
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past