The Environmental Protection Administration’s (EPA) ad hoc committee yesterday approved seven offshore wind farm projects proposed by Denmark-based Orsted Energy and Nantou-based Swancor Renewable Energy Co.
The projects — four by Orsted and three by Swancor — are to be located off the coast Changhua County, which has become a competitive battlefield for wind farm developers.
However, the ad hoc committee’s conclusions must still be confirmed by the EPA’s Environmental Impact Assessment committee.
Yesterday’s approved projects bring to 14 the number of projects centered off Chuanghua that the ad hoc committee has greenlit.
Yesterday’s meetings were the third committee reviews for Orsted and Swancor’s projects.
To win approval, the two firms had reduced their development areas to avoid overlapping with shipping lanes or damage the habitat of Taiwanese humpback dolphins.
Orsted plans to install between 218 and 301 wind turbines at No. 12, 13, 14 and 15 planned sites, with their maximum capacity reaching about 2.4 gigawatts (GW).
At sites No. 11, 16 and 17, Swancor plans to install a maximum of 228 turbines, with a capacity totaling just over 2GW.
Some committee members raised concerns about potential historic remains in the waters near the proposed sites and the migration routes of migratory birds.
Committee member Liu Yi-chang (劉益昌) urged the two firms to promise to adjust the location of their turbines if they find historic remains offshore, and they agreed.
Orsted had proposed demarcating four routes used by migratory birds within the range of its wind farms, but committee member Lee Chien-ming (李堅明) asked it to establish more concrete plans.
Developers should also evaluate how to strive for “carbon rights” in the international community, considering wind energy can reduce the nation’s carbon emissions compared with coal-fired or gas-fired power, he added.
The ad hoc committee imposed several requirements on the developers, including asking them to propose plans to reduce air pollutants such as sulfur oxides and fine particulate matter emitted from machine engines powered by diesel fuels.
Orsted earlier this month signed memorandums of understanding with China Steel Corp and Century Wind Power — a subsidiary of Century Iron & Steel Industrial Co, said Matthias Bausenwein, the company’s general manager for the Asia-Pacific region.
The four offshore wind farms are Orsted’s biggest investment plan outside Denmark, he told reporters after the meeting at the EPA, adding that its investment is expected to reach NT$300 billion (US$9.99 billion).
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,