The Cingshuei Geothermal Power Plant, the first privately built geothermal plant in Taiwan, is set to obtain a commercial license by the end of this month.
The 4.2 megawatt (MW) plant in Yilan County would generate enough electricity to power 10,000 households and has potential for expansion to further utilize the area’s geothermal resources.
Yilan has long been recognized as having the greatest potential for geothermal energy generation in Taiwan, with hot springs in the area bubbling so hot that tourists boil eggs in them.
Photo courtesy of Yilan County Government via CNA
State-run Taiwan Power Co (台電) has since the 1980s sponsored a 3MW plant in Cingshuei, but the project ran into trouble due to corrosion and silt blockage, and was eventually abandoned.
The current project, developed by Fabulous Power Co (結元能源開發), imported equipment from Nevada-based Ormat Technologies Inc.
The plant extracts water with temperatures of up to 180°C from 1,200m to 2,100m underground and runs it through a heat exchanger to generate electricity, before pumping it back into the ground again.
“The plant takes the heat, but not the water,” the Yilan County Government said in a press release.
Fabulous Power won the right to use the land occupied by the failed pilot plant in 2017, the county government said.
Fabulous Power president Lin Bo-hsiu (林伯修) last month told the Chinese-language Business Today magazine that he never gave up hope.
“People told me the energy just wasn’t there, but for eight years I went from well to well, and I studied different methods and different equipment,” Lin said.
Lin said that the 4.2MW generation capacity is just the beginning.
He estimated there was 30MW to 60MW of power generation potential in the Chingshuei area alone.
Reliable geothermal energy could be a perfect complement to other alternative energy sources such as solar and wind, which generate power only intermittently, he said.
RESERVES ADEQUATE: The central bank governor rejected claims that Taiwan was facing a cash shortage, saying that its financial system had ample savings The New Taiwan dollar’s 3 percent fall this year despite record exports and a widening trade surplus stems from foreign investors cashing in on the local stock market’s technology-driven rally and moving funds overseas, central bank Governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) told lawmakers yesterday. The NT dollar has become one of Asia’s weakest-performing major currencies this year. Foreign investors have reaped substantial gains from Taiwan’s surging stock market, prompting them to sell shares and rebalance their portfolios, Yang told a meeting of the legislature’s Finance Committee in Taipei. Their withdrawals have added to downward pressure on the NT dollar, offsetting support
‘ON SCHEDULE’: Chief executive officer Rick Tsai said that TSMC ‘remains our most important partner’ as MediaTek seeks to meet robust customer demand Chip designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday said it has secured a second customer for its customized artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator for data centers, while volume production of a second-generation chip for an existing customer is on track for early 2028, potentially easing market concerns about possible delays. This is a new customer and, crucially, not from China, MediaTek said. The remarks were meant to dismiss speculation that ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), the parent company of TikTok, was the second customer for MediaTek’s new customized AI application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) business. “It is on track, on schedule. We understand there is some noise about the
The artificial intelligence (AI) supercycle should last for more than two decades, former Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger told an event in Taipei yesterday, dismissing fears of an AI bubble amid mounting skepticism over massive infrastructure investments. “We do see that there will be periods of disruption, correction, etc. So, we do not think of it as an AI bubble,” Gelsinger, who is a general partner at Playground Global LLC, said at the US venture capital firm’s second annual Taiwan Deep Tech Summit. However, “we’ll have some speed bumps as different areas and different technology disruptions occur along it,” Gelsinger
ROOM TO GROW: The company’s biggest bottleneck is still space, chief financial officer Joseph Tung said, adding that it was scouting existing factories to acquire ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控) yesterday raised its annual capital expenditure budget for the third time to US$11.5 billion, driven by expectations that customer demand next year would continue to outpace capacity, particularly for its leading-edge advanced packaging (LEAP) technologies used in artificial intelligence (AI) chips. ASE, the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, plans to add US$1 billion to its US$10.5 billion outlay on capacity expansion. About 60 percent of the US$500 million equipment budget would be allocated for LEAP and 40 percent for mainstream packaging technology capacity, ASE chief financial officer Joseph Tung (董宏思) told an online investors’
RSS