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.
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