The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday cut the preliminary feed-in tariff for offshore wind energy developers over the next 20 years by 12.7 percent due to falling installation costs, dealing a blow to developers that were expecting it to remain the same.
The preliminary feed-in tariff should be capped at NT$5.1060 per unit during the 20-year period from next year, as the lifetime costs of wind turbine installations should slide gradually, the ministry told a media briefing.
The current tariff is NT$5.8498 per unit.
“The wind energy task force has factored in all potential cost increases in the new tariff, as interested wind farm developers have to meet some special requirements, which are not seen in other countries,” Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs Tseng Wen-sheng (曾文生) said.
The extra burden includes higher costs stemming from adopting certain locally made materials, equipment, or underwater jacks, as the government aims to help local manufacturers build wind energy-related technologies through collaborations with foreign companies.
Developers that have passed the ministry’s review and have been granted the right to build wind farms on the east coast are required to ink a power purchase agreement (PPA) with state-run Taiwan Power Corp (Taipower, 台電) by the end of next year.
The ministry said the new feed-in tariff should be finalized by February after holding public hearings to collect opinions about the issue by the end of next month.
Orsted president for Asia-Pacific Matthias Bausenwein said that the company might reconsider its plan to invest in offshore wind farms on the granted locations if the new feed-in tariff pushes through and the firm does not sign a PPA this year.
The new tariff would directly affect the procurement agreements it has inked with local partners, Bausenwein said in a statement yesterday.
Orsted signed a multimillion-US-dollar contract with a China Steel Corp (中鋼) subsidiary to buy 56 jack foundations for the company’s first 900-megawatt project to be installed in 2021.
Hai Long Offshore Wind (海龍), a joint venture between Northland Power Inc and Yushan Energy Co (玉山能源), on Tuesday said that the memorandum of understanding it signed with MHI Vestas Offshore Wind to procure 300 megawatts of offshore wind turbines would be conditional on whether it signs a PPA either this year or next year and tariffs remaining stable relative to the price this year.
The ministry also proposed trimming feed-in tariffs for solar and other forms of green energy.
The preliminary tariff for ground mount solar panel arrays would see the largest drop of 12.15 percent to NT$3.9686 per unit next year, compared with roof-top solar panels and solar facilities on reservoirs or fishing farms.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
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