New amendments to the Electricity Act (電業法) cannot effectively solve the risk of a power shortage and the government might not be able to achieve its goal of a nuclear-free homeland by 2025 if inefficient power supply remains a problem, an environmental non-profit organization said yesterday.
Mom Loves Taiwan, an association founded by mothers dedicated to monitoring nuclear power policies, said that state utility Taiwan Power Co’s (Taipower) poor maintenance ability and management are the main reasons why power problems persist.
Mom Loves Taiwan director Gloria Hsu (徐光蓉) said that the Ministry of Economic Affairs has been misled by Taipower into believing that the nation needs to rent power generation units from other countries or that the operation of emergency standby generators have been stalled by environmental reviews when the real problem is Taipower’s inefficient management.
She said that an analysis of Taipower’s data showed that because of the company’s limited maintenance capability, it was often conducting maintenance on equipment during peak demand, while the interval between maintenances is too long, causing the equipment to be overused.
Moreover, delays in the construction of new or upgraded facilities, as well as low power generation efficiency — with Taipower’s coal-fired and gas-fired power plants lagging behind those of private power companies — are causing power disruptions, she said.
“The passage of the amendments to the Electricity Act [last week] will only make Taipower an even more dominant monopolistic power that is harder for the government to control,” she said.
The government should further amend the act to separate power plants to promote competitiveness and improve the electric power industry, she said.
Although the government pledged to achieve a nuclear-free homeland and increase the percentage of power supplied by renewable sources to 20 percent by 2025, renewable energy accounts for only 4 percent of the nation’s total power supply years after the Renewable Energy Development Act (再生能源發展條例) was passed in 2009, Mom Loves Taiwan secretary-general Yang Shun-mei (楊順美) said.
Yang urged the government to make public its plan to achieve that goal, so that the public can monitor its execution.
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