Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) has “deliberately overestimated” the nation’s future electricity demand, while underestimating its overall power supply capacity to fool the public into believing that the suspension of the construction of the Forth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s (新北市) Gongliao District (貢寮) would result in electricity shortage and higher electricity costs, a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislator said yesterday.
Citing a memorandum on the country’s energy policies and construction and safety of the controversy-plagued power plant published by Taipower in January, DPP Legislator Cheng Li-chun (鄭麗君) said that the state-owned utility has created a false impression that the nation was in desperate need of nuclear energy by purposely lowering its estimates of the country’s power supply capacity.
The memorandum cited three power development plans tendered by the state-owned utility last year — including one marked as No. 10104 Case in April, No. 10106 Case in June and No. 10109 Case in September — which concluded that the nation could see its reserve margin falling below the stipulated 15 percent after next year and could be at a higher risk of power cuts should construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant be halted and the three operating nuclear power plants be decommissioned as scheduled.
The the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Shihmen District (石門) is scheduled to be decommissioned in 2019, with the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) closing in 2023 and the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant in Ma-anshan (馬鞍山), Pingtung County, in 2025.
However, Cheng cast doubt on the three power development plans, whose publications ran counter to the normal practice in which only one such plan was issued each year and all of which he said oddly adopted lower projections for the nation’s power generating capacity in the future.
Such power development plans feature Taipower’s estimates of the nation’s power demand and energy supply capacity in the upcoming 10 to 15 years, based on which the company would then propose a series of energy development plans.
However, as Taipower calculates an electricity generating plant’s power supply capacity by multiplying the plant’s installed capacity, the maximum amount of electricity a station can produce at any given time, by its reliability index, the company’s estimates of the nation’s overall power supply capacity could be questionable, Cheng said.
“Taipower could arbitrarily underestimate the nation’s overall power supply capacity by lowering a specific plant’s installed capacity or reliability index,” Cheng said.
He added that the largest discrepancy between the three power development plans’ estimations of the nation’s total installed capacity was about 4,850 megawatts, close to the three currently operational nuclear power plants’ total capacity of 5,144 megawatts.
Calling on Taipower to refrain from threatening the public and saying that the nation will suffer from power shortages in the absence of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, Cheng urged President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration to listen to public opinion and put an immediate halt to the construction of the plant.
Meanwhile, sources close to the issue yesterday said that six engineers from US-based General Electric (GE) are scheduled to join a group of local and foreign experts to assist with safety checks at the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant.
The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the six individuals are members of a trial-run test group suggested by Lin Tsung-yao (林宗堯), a former member of the Atomic Energy Council’s Fourth Nuclear Power Plant Safety Monitoring Committee.
According to Taipower, there are currently more than 100 foreign engineers working on the construction site of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, including some from GE, which is responsible for the design of the plant.
Minister of Econonmic Affairs Chang Chia-juch (張家祝) said previously that the test group, comprising of more than 50 local and foreign experts, is expected to be in position by April 2 to conduct the safety checks.
Chang said that after the experts have moved into the plant, it will take about one month for them to confirm all the standard operating procedures.
He said that the safety checks will start in May and will take about six months to complete.
Additional reporting by CNA
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching