The Ministry of Economic Affairs punished 25 executives at state-run utility Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) over power outages and emergency shutdowns earlier this year, it said on Friday.
The executives, including Taipower chairman Yang Wei-fuu (楊偉甫) and president Chung Bin-li (鍾炳利), were given punishments ranging from warnings to major demerits for the outages on May 13, May 17 and July 27, Minister of Economic Affairs Wang Mei-hua (王美花) said.
Attributing the incidents to human error or bad execution, Wang said that they not only affected people’s day-to-day lives, but also dealt a severe blow to public confidence in the national power supply, which is why Yang and Chung were each given a major demerit.
Photo: Liu Hsin-te, Taipei Times
The ministry, which oversees Taipower, has established a task force to bolster the nation’s power supply, especially during peak hours at night, and its mid to long-term goal is to increase the share of green energy in the overall power generation mix, she said.
The May 13 incident, which caused the shutdown of the Hsinta Power Plant (興達電廠) in Kaohsiung’s Yongan District (永安), occurred after a worker from an outside contractor operated a switch incorrectly while conducting tests related to the expansion of an ultra-high-voltage substation, Wang said.
That mistake resulted in a switchgear ground fault, in which an electrical current takes an alternative path to the ground, causing a circuit break that shut down the plant and reduced the amount of power generated.
On May 17, Taipower implemented another nationwide rolling blackout to deal with a sudden surge in demand for electricity exceeded supply, resulting in “execution” problems, Wang said.
The July 27 incident at the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) occurred when cleaners in the facility’s control room accidentally dislodged an acrylic cover of a steam isolation valve while moving chairs, which caused an automatic shutdown of the plant’s No. 2 reactor.
The string of incidents, especially the back-to-back outages in May, triggered widespread concern, exacerbated by top government officials’ pledges prior to the mishaps that Taiwan had sufficient power.
The May 13 outage caused NT$470 million (US$16.83 million) in damages to Taipower, and the company is to ask the contractor to pay half of it, as an investigation recommended it should shoulder half of the responsibility, Wang said.
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