A spike in demand for electricity made it necessary to restart the third coal-fired generator at the Taichung Power Plant, Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) said yesterday as a feud with the Taichung City Government lingers.
Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) has sought to keep the generator from being used. In 2019, he revoked Taipower’s license to operate the generator.
However, the state-run utility has taken the city government to court over the license revocation and won the case in February last year, Taipower manager Chang Ting-shu (張廷抒) said.
Photo: Su Ching-feng, Taipei Times
“We would like to remind the Taichung City Government that operation of the third coal-fired generator is completely legal,” Chang said, adding that the municipality is being “unreasonable and obstructive.”
The plant has long been a sore spot for residents, who complain about pollution.
Taipower said an unexpected high rate of electricity use while plants elsewhere were undergoing maintenance made it inevitable that the generator would be brought back online.
“From January to last month, we used 3.3 percent more electricity than the same period last year,” Chang said. “Returning Taiwanese manufacturers, high demand for exports and increased domestic electricity use are all up.”
“We were taken by surprise,” he said.
The generator has been retrofitted to reduce pollution, Chang said.
“It used to emit 0.6g to 0.7g of particulate pollution per kilowatt-hour, but that has been reduced to 0.46g,” he said.
Taichung’s air quality problems would subside when liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants — due to come online this summer — start generating electricity, he said, adding that Taiwan would not face an electricity shortage this summer.
However, Taiwan’s water situation is exacerbating an electricity crisis, said Chen Jong-shun (陳中舜), an assistant research fellow at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (中華經濟研究院).
“Taiwan is highly reliant on hydroelectricity to adjust peak energy usage, and the serious water shortage has directly affected our ability to use hydroelectricity,” Chen said.
The problem would worsen, as energy use spikes in summer, with July and August bringing the greatest demand, he said.
Moreover, the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) in June is to reduce electricity generation.
The central government should keep the Guosheng and Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant in Pingtung County’s Ma-anshan (馬鞍山) running beyond their planned lifespans to save Taiwan from further power crunches, Chen said.
“It is absolutely doable on a technical level, as long as Taipei has the political resolve,” he added.
This week’s undoing of the TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin and its sister token, Luna, has ramifications for all of crypto. First, there is the immediate impact: The rapid collapse of a once-popular pair of cryptocurrencies sent a ripple effect across the industry, contributing to plummeting coin prices that wiped hundreds of billions of market value from the digital-asset market and stoked worries over the potential fragility of digital-asset ventures. Then there are the knock-on effects. In addition to delivering punishing losses to individual users and investment firms, the spectacular failure of a market darling like Terra threatens to have a cooling effect
China’s biggest chipmaker has cut its outlook for the second quarter, joining a growing list of manufacturers warning about the fallout from lockdowns aimed at containing the country’s worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co (SMIC, 中芯) estimates a month-long lockdown in Shanghai could spur component shortages and logistics tangles, and erase about 5 percent of its output in the second quarter. “We are trying our best to mitigate the impact on product delivery,” SMIC Chairman Gao Yonggang (高永崗) told analysts on a call yesterday morning. “We are still assessing the actual impact as many suppliers restart their
DISRUPTIONS: The war in Ukraine, China’s lockdown measures, rising interest rates and inflation have thrown a wrench into business plans made years in advance Samsung Electronics Co is talking with foundry clients about charging as much as 20 percent more for making semiconductors this year, joining an industry-wide push to hike prices to cover rising costs of materials and logistics. Contract-based chip prices are likely to rise around 15 percent to 20 percent, depending upon the level of sophistication, people familiar with the matter said. Chips produced on legacy nodes would face bigger price hikes, while new pricing would be applied from the second half of this year, they said, adding that Samsung has finished negotiating with some clients and is in discussions with others. Samsung’s decision
material SHORTAGE: Even as workers are about to return, Quanta lacks operating supplies, while Pegatron reported its lowest revenues in 11 quarters, the companies said Taiwan’s major Apple Inc supplier cut its outlook for the second quarter, joining a growing list of manufacturers warning about the fallout from lockdowns aimed at containing China’s worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years. Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦), which assembles MacBooks, expects a 20 percent quarterly fall in notebook shipments and a squeeze on margins this quarter due to the lockdown, a company representative said on Friday during an earnings call. The impact from supply chain disruptions could last until the end of the year, she said. The company’s Shanghai factory has been operating under tight restrictions since the middle of last month,