Taiwan might be heading into another record summer of electricity use, Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) said yesterday.
First-quarter electricity use increased 3 percent year-on-year, with the last three days of last month breaking record peak use for March, the state-run utility said.
So far this month, power use is up 7 percent year-on-year. The most power used this month was on Thursday last week when 32.765 gigawatts (GW) were used in a day, up from the previous April record of 29.99GW.
Photo: Lin Cheng-kun, Taipei Times
The all-time record for single-day electricity use was set on July 23 last year, when usage reached 38.02GW.
“We expect that record to be broken this year,” Taipower manager Chang Ting-shu (張廷抒) said.
Taipower said that it was caught by surprise by how power use has been growing ahead of expectations, even before the arrival of the summer heat.
Increased domestic demand might have been caused by the stable economy, it added.
Taiwan’s electricity usage has increased year-on-year every year in the past few years, growing more than 2 percent last year.
Electricity generation capacity might also be strained by the water shortage, which has reduced first quarter hydroelectric power generation 16 percent year-on-year, Taipower said.
Chang said that he is still “confident” that Taipower will have the 10 percent reserve capacity necessary to handle summer peak demand, but it absolutely cannot do it without the four coal-fired generators in Taichung.
Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) is blocking construction of two liquified natural gas (LNG) generators pending the decommissioning of the four coal-fired generators.
Chang said that delaying the construction of the new LNG generators would only delay the decommissioning of the older coal-fired generators.
“Mayor Lu is holding the construction of the new LNG generators hostage, but we cannot shut off the coal generators without creating a potential power crisis,” Chang said.
The new LNG plants would take five years to construct, 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,
RSS