The government is to implement phase-three water rationing in New Taipei City’s Linkou (林口), Banciao (板橋) and Sinjhuang (新莊) districts, and in Taoyuan on April 1 amid declining water levels at the Shihmen Reservoir (石門水庫) in Taoyuan, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday.
“This is a necessary decision in a bid to extend the length of the water supply from the Shihmen Reservoir,” Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Yang Wei-fuu (楊偉甫) told a press conference after a water supply meeting.
Water is to be supplied to the areas only five days per week on a rotation basis, affecting more than 1.01 million households and industrial users, Yang said.
Photo: CNA
“If the situation deteriorates, we might further increase the number of days that the water supply is suspended, such as supplying water for four days and then suspending the supply for two days,” he said. “The worst-case scenario would be to supply water only for a certain number of hours per day, but we are doing everything we can to prevent that from happening.”
Yang said it was agreed to reduce the supply of water to industrial users from the Shihmen Reservoir and the Yungshan (永和山水庫) Reservoir in Miaoli County.
“The 7.5 percent decrease in the daily water supply to industrial users will be increased to 10 percent, beginning on Monday next week,” Yang said.
The meeting also agreed to increase the daily reduction in supply to other industrial users to 7.5 percent from 5 percent, he said.
The Industrial Development Bureau is to report on the potential impact of phase-three water rationing on local industries by the end of next month, Yang said.
Yang said the government wants to encourage households to use water-saving tools to conserve water, including water-saving faucets.
The government plans to discount the bills of individual households if they save more than 30 percent of their water usage compared with last year, Yang said, adding that details of the plan are to be announced by the end of next month.
The government is considering implementing nighttime water rationing during the low-water season between November and March on a regular basis, he said.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS