China Steel Corp (CSC, 中鋼) yesterday broke ground in Kaohsiung’s Singda Harbor (興達港) for a plant to construct undersea foundation facilities for offshore wind turbines.
China Steel said it expects to complete construction of the plant in the Marine Technology Industry Innovation Zone (海洋科技產業創新專區) at the end of next year and begin mass production of 50 to 60 jacket foundations annually, starting in 2020.
President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration is promoting offshore wind farms as part of its plans to expand renewable energy generation to help relieve the strain on electricity supplies from state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電).
Photo: CNA
In light of the potential demand for undersea foundation facilities for offshore wind turbines, China Steel’s board approved investing NT$3.42 billion (US$116.72 million) to set up a company to take charge of the plant’s construction, the company said on March 28.
Last month the company announced it was teaming up with Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and the Changhua County Government to develop three offshore wind farms on the west coast, with a total investment of more than NT$210 billion.
SIGNING CEREMONY
Cheng Ching-chung (程慶鐘), commissioner of China Steel’s wind power business development committee and chairman of the new company, signed a cooperation agreement with representatives of 11 supply-chain firms at yesterday’s ceremony, including CSBC Corp, Taiwan (台灣國際造船) chairman Cheng Wen-lon (鄭文隆).
Minister of Economic Affairs Shen Jong-chin (沈榮津) and Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) attended the ceremony, along with China Steel chairman Wong Chao-tung (翁朝棟).
The government wants to see 5.5 gigawatts of electricity generated by offshore wind farms by 2025, Shen said.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs would start the selection process for offshore wind farm projects this week, he said.
Seven of the 11 suppliers are based in Kaohsiung, which highlights China Steel’s efforts to localize the development of underwater foundations, Wong said.
The company also wants to build a local supply chain for wind turbines through collaborations with a variety of its business partners, he said.
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
DIVERSIFICATION: The chip designer expects new non-smartphone products to be available next year or in 2025 as it seeks new growth engines to broaden its portfolio MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it expects non-mobile phone chips, such as automotive chips, to drive its growth beyond 2025, as it pursues diversification to create a more balanced portfolio. The Hsinchu-based chip designer said it has counted on smartphone chips, power management chips and chips for other applications to fuel its growth in the past few years, but it is developing new products to continue growing. “Our future growth drivers, of course, will be outside of smartphones,” MediaTek chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting in Hsinchu City. “As new products would be available next year
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness
At a red-brick factory in the German port city of Hamburg, cocoa bean shells go in one end and out the other comes an amazing black powder with the potential to counter climate change. The substance, dubbed biochar, is produced by heating the cocoa husks in an oxygen-free room to 600°C. The process locks in greenhouse gases and the final product can be used as a fertilizer, or as an ingredient in the production of “green” concrete. While the biochar industry is still in its infancy, the technology offers a novel way to remove carbon from the Earth’s atmosphere, experts have said. Biochar could