Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) yesterday signed a preferred bidder agreement with Dutch dredging and heavylift company Royal Boskalis Westminster NV and local marine construction company Hwa chi Construction Co (樺棋營造) to facilitate its wind farm projects off the coast of Changhua County.
Royal Boskalis offshore energy division director Marcel van Bergen said at the signing ceremony that the Papendrecht, Netherlands-headquartered company has set up a joint venture with Hwa chi, in which the latter has a 51 percent stake and Royal Boskalis the remaining 49 percent, to undertake the transport and installation of submarine foundations for CIP’s Chang Fang (彰芳) and Xidao (西島) projects.
Royal Boskalis also plans to extend its roots in Taiwan’s emerging wind industry in the next five to 10 years, Bergen said, adding that the company has started reaching out to more local firms in the supply chain.
Construction is to be completed by the end of 2023 and the two wind farms would have a combined capacity of 600 megawatts, CIP said.
CIP said it is further looking to localize the supply chain for another 100 megawatts in wind power capacity.
“In 2021, there is no requirement to localize these contracts, so we are doing this beyond our requirements,” CIP Taiwan project office chief executive officer Jesper Krarup Holst told reporters on the sidelines of the signing ceremony.
“We are also progressing on all the other fronts, on the turbine localization, on the onshore work localization,” Holst added.
“We can say that there are areas where Taiwanese contractors are not yet completely there and we have seen in the past that the government has allowed some developers to procure partially from Taiwan and partially from international companies,” he said as he expressed the company’s desire for the authorities to allow CIP to make overseas purchases to ensure that the projects are completed on time.
Holst provided the example of an underwater communications cable, which needs to comply with strict manufacturing guidelines as it can easily break.
CIP Taiwan project office director Marina Hsu (許乃文) said that the company would need more freedom to sign overseas contracts to ensure the profitability of its projects.
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
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Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
Until US President Donald Trump’s return a year ago, when the EU talked about cutting economic dependency on foreign powers — it was understood to mean China, but now Brussels has US tech in its sights. As Trump ramps up his threats — from strong-arming Europe on trade to pushing to seize Greenland — concern has grown that the unpredictable leader could, should he so wish, plunge the bloc into digital darkness. Since Trump’s Greenland climbdown, top officials have stepped up warnings that the EU is dangerously exposed to geopolitical shocks and must work toward strategic independence — in defense, energy and
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