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.
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