The government should take more concrete action, including raising electricity prices, to speed up energy transformation, especially as the EU is mulling a carbon border tax, National Taiwan University’s Risk Society and Policy Research Center said yesterday.
The center published a 439-page report titled Taiwan in Transformation: Initiating a Long-term Energy Transition at a forum in Taipei, urging the government, as well as candidates for next year’s presidential election, to take the issue more seriously.
Taiwan’s energy transformation from a “brown economy” to a low-carbon economy has been sluggish, with only 5.65 percent of its total electricity last year generated from renewable sources, including hydropower, center principal investigator Chou Kuei-tien (周桂田) said.
Photo: CNA
The EU considering imposing a carbon border tax shows that climate change is not merely a disaster, but has also spurred a new market mechanism, Chou said, adding that Taiwanese firms could lose foreign clients if they do not switch to renewable energy sources soon.
Taiwan’s electricity prices last year averaged about NT$2.60 per kilowatt-hour, which does not properly reflect external costs, center postdoctoral researcher Chao Chia-wei (趙家緯) said.
After factoring in the negative effects of air pollution, coal-fired plants absolutely do not provide cost-efficient power as the Chinese National Federation of Industries has claimed, he said.
To reflect the external cost of electricity price, the government should raise the price by 6 percent at its electricity price review next year, and put the energy tax act in the political agenda according to Taiwan's Sustainable Development Goals implementation plan, he added.
Despite the enactment of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction and Management Act (溫室氣體減量及管理法) in 2015, the nation’s carbon reduction efforts have lagged behind the act’s planned schedule and government agencies have not cooperated well, Chou said.
The Executive Yuan should learn from the UK and Germany and establish an independent board on climate action that can integrate and monitor efforts by government agencies to reduce carbon emissions, he said.
Presidential candidates with foresight should grasp the global energy transformation mantle and propose concrete steps to address the issue, he added.
Individual increases to electricity prices should not exceed 3 percent, while adjustments should be determined by an interagency committee, Minister Without Portfolio Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) said at one of the forum’s sessions.
Coal-fired plants have this year generated 47.6 percent of the nation’s power, while gas-fired plants generated 33.5 percent, nuclear power plants 10.1 percent and renewable energy sources 4.6 percent, he said.
The government aims to increase the contribution by renewable energy sources to 20 percent by 2025, with that of gas-fired units increasing to 50 percent and coal-fired plants falling to 27 percent, while the rest is generated by mixed sources, Kung said.
Work to complete the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮), which was officially mothballed in July 2015, would not be restarted, he added.
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:
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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