The Ministry of Economic Affairs on Friday said it expects the nation to obtain 15.1 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025, falling short of a 20 percent target set by President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in 2016.
The Taiwan Energy Statistics Year Book report, published on Friday by the Bureau of Energy, said that the share of renewables in the nation’s electricity mix had increased to 6 percent by the end of last year and is expected to reach 8 percent by the end of this year.
After taking office in 2016 — when renewables accounted for 4.1 percent of Taiwan’s electricity mix — Tsai laid out plans to obtain 20 percent of the nation’s electricity from renewables by 2025, with 50 percent coming from natural gas and 30 percent from coal.
Photo: CNA
The plan was part of a campaign promise to phase out the country’s three remaining nuclear power plants, which provided about 9.6 percent of Taiwan’s electricity last year.
The report blamed the target shortfall on increasing demand for electricity.
Electricity consumption last year rose 4.5 percent from a year earlier, driven by increased production in the manufacturing sector after the global economy rebounded from the COVID-19 pandemic, the report said.
Meanwhile, integrating renewable energy sources into the grid in a way that allows them to operate at full capacity remains a challenge, with grid connections for renewable sources not expected to be completed until the end of 2025, it said.
The government is now hoping to realize Tsai’s 20 percent target by October 2026, it added.
By utilizing power generation from offshore wind farms, solar projects and biofuel energy, the government aims to increase the share of renewables to 21 percent in 2027 and 23 percent in 2028, the report said.
As of the end of last year, the nation’s total solar installation only reached 7.7 gigawatt (GW), missing the government’s target of 8.75GW, energy bureau data showed.
It was the third consecutive year Taiwan failed to meet its solar installation goal.
The 2020 target was 6.5GW, but only 5.82GW was operational at the end of that year, the data showed.
To achieve the government’s 2025 target of 20GW from solar installations, it must annually add a capacity of 3GW from this year.
However, the nation’s newly added capacity was 680 megawatt in the first five months of the year, reaching only 22.7 percent of the year’s target, with accumulated installation of 8.38GW far below the government’s expectations.
Companies in the solar industry attributed the slower-than-expected adoption to soaring raw material prices, logistics bottlenecks caused by COVID-19 lockdowns in China, worldwide port congestion and surging freight rates.
The bureau said it had launched several measures to encourage solar installation, including on June 28, announcing it would maintain its solar feed-in tariffs for the second half of the year, citing rising installation costs.
It also started requiring rooftop solar system installation on suitable buildings, regardless of whether they are newly built, extensions or reconstructions, it added.
Additional reporting by Chen Cheng-hui
Nissan Motor Co has agreed to sell its global headquarters in Yokohama for ￥97 billion (US$630 million) to a group sponsored by Taiwanese autoparts maker Minth Group (敏實集團), as the struggling automaker seeks to shore up its financial position. The acquisition is led by a special purchase company managed by KJR Management Ltd, a Japanese real-estate unit of private equity giant KKR & Co, people familiar with the matter said. KJR said it would act as asset manager together with Mizuho Real Estate Management Co. Nissan is undergoing a broad cost-cutting campaign by eliminating jobs and shuttering plants as it grapples
PERSISTENT RUMORS: Nvidia’s CEO said the firm is not in talks to sell AI chips to China, but he would welcome a change in US policy barring the activity Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company is not in discussions to sell its Blackwell artificial intelligence (AI) chips to Chinese firms, waving off speculation it is trying to engineer a return to the world’s largest semiconductor market. Huang, who arrived in Taiwan yesterday ahead of meetings with longtime partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), took the opportunity to clarify recent comments about the US-China AI race. The Nvidia head caused a stir in an interview this week with the Financial Times, in which he was quoted as saying “China will win” the AI race. Huang yesterday said
TEMPORARY TRUCE: China has made concessions to ease rare earth trade controls, among others, while Washington holds fire on a 100% tariff on all Chinese goods China is effectively suspending implementation of additional export controls on rare earth metals and terminating investigations targeting US companies in the semiconductor supply chain, the White House announced. The White House on Saturday issued a fact sheet outlining some details of the trade pact agreed to earlier in the week by US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that aimed to ease tensions between the world’s two largest economies. Under the deal, China is to issue general licenses valid for exports of rare earths, gallium, germanium, antimony and graphite “for the benefit of US end users and their suppliers
Dutch chipmaker Nexperia BV’s China unit yesterday said that it had established sufficient inventories of finished goods and works-in-progress, and that its supply chain remained secure and stable after its parent halted wafer supplies. The Dutch company suspended supplies of wafers to its Chinese assembly plant a week ago, calling it “a direct consequence of the local management’s recent failure to comply with the agreed contractual payment terms,” Reuters reported on Friday last week. Its China unit called Nexperia’s suspension “unilateral” and “extremely irresponsible,” adding that the Dutch parent’s claim about contractual payment was “misleading and highly deceptive,” according to a statement
RSS