The Ministry of Economic Affairs will improve the trade of renewable energy certificates by balancing supply and demand through reasonable pricing, and it plans to set up a trading platform by January next year, an official said yesterday.
The government has vowed to generate 20 percent of the nation’s electricity from renewable energy sources by 2025, when it also plans to phase out existing nuclear power generation facilities.
After amendments to the Renewable Energy Development Act (再生能源發展條例) were promulgated in May, big electricity users are required to ensure that certain ratios of their power supply come from renewable energy sources, Minister Without Portfolio Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) told a forum on renewable energy in Taipei.
Photo: Lin Chia-nan, Taipei Times
Rising demand for renewable energy — either due to the act or corporate social responsibility — highlights the importance of renewable power certificates and their trading mechanism, he said, expressing the hope that the nation’s renewable energy trading market would become more active.
Sufficient supply of power from renewable energy sources, easy access and reasonable prices are key to boosting transactions in the renewable energy market, Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Lin Chuan-neng (林全能) said.
Having set clear goals in enhancing the ratio of renewable power sources, the bureau estimates that by next year, the installed capacity of renewable energy would reach 11.3 gigawatts, Lin said.
To facilitate renewable energy trade, the government established the National Renewable Energy Certification Center in April 2017, while the Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection is planning to launch a certificate trading platform by Jan. 1 next year, he said.
As of yesterday, 59,973 certificates had been issued — 51,325 certificates for wind power, 8,560 for solar power and 88 for biomass power, but only 2,759 certificates have been sold, the center’s Web site showed.
Asked to comment on the wide gap between issued and sold certificates, Lin said that integration between the certificates and renewable power sources needs improvement.
The transactions would also be improved if there is a better pricing mechanism, he said, adding that the bureau and the center would further analyze the costs of different renewable energy sources.
Delivering a speech titled “Let the Sunshine In” at the forum, Google senior lead for energy and infrastructure Amanda Corio said that renewables have become more cost-effective and that energy storage projects are critically important to ensure stable power supply.
Taiwan still has higher costs of renewables than other places, she said, expressing the hope that the barrier would be removed.
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