The Bureau of Energy yesterday dismissed as “fake news” a rumor that electricity rates are to rise by NT$30,000 per year per household, after Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) used the figure in comments criticizing the government’s energy transition plans.
“I agree it’s better to burn gas than coal, but if we end up using 50 percent gas in our energy mix by 2025, by my calculations that is going to cost an extra NT$30,000 per year per household,” Ko said in a radio show interview.
Bureau Deputy Director-General Lee Chun-li (李君禮) said that the NT$30,000 figure is wrong.
Photo: CNA
“I don’t know where Mayor Ko got it from, but unfortunately that erroneous figure has been floating around for years,” Lee said by telephone.
The erroneous figure comes from dividing the cost of the energy transition by the number of households, but households account for less than 20 percent of energy consumption in Taiwan, Lee said.
Industry consumes the most energy, followed by commercial use, Lee said, adding that the erroneous figure also takes the cumulative cost of the energy transition and presents it as a yearly cost.
“It is true that natural gas is more expensive than coal, but it also releases less greenhouse gasses,” Lee said. “In the future, a global trend will be to take the cost of carbon into account when generating electricity, and Taiwan will be no exception.”
However, there continues to be advances in the field of renewables, so prices keep coming down, Lee said, adding that the price of power generated on some wind farms has already fallen below the average price of electricity.
The government has also instituted a policy to insulate the least wealthy households from price spikes by limiting each price increase or decrease to 3 percent, and by freezing the cost of the first 330 kilowatt-hours per month per household.
“About 70 percent of households use less electricity than that,” Lee said.
ADVANCED: Previously, Taiwanese chip companies were restricted from building overseas fabs with technology less than two generations behind domestic factories Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp, would no longer be restricted from investing in next-generation 2-nanometer chip production in the US, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. However, the ministry added that the world’s biggest contract chipmaker would not be making any reckless decisions, given the weight of its up to US$30 billion investment. To safeguard Taiwan’s chip technology advantages, the government has barred local chipmakers from making chips using more advanced technologies at their overseas factories, in China particularly. Chipmakers were previously only allowed to produce chips using less advanced technologies, specifically
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
RSS