Taiwan’s cities are experiencing serious air pollution, largely because 35 percent of the nation’s electricity is generated from coal. Faced with a wave of public protest, several coal-fired power stations have responded by cutting their outputs.
This year’s autumn is unusually hot and the Central Weather Bureau has said that temperatures have hit a 70-year high.
Warmer weather means more use of air conditioning. If the base-load electricity supply from coal-fired power plants is reduced under such conditions, it might lead to more power outages.
This situation calls for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to temporarily drop its call for a non-nuclear homeland and restart nuclear power plants, which provide base-load power without causing air pollution, killing two birds with one stone by resolving the environmental and electricity supply problems.
As an economy grows, power demand also grows. If coal-fired generation is reduced from current levels and we scrap nuclear plants, which provide base-load power without polluting the air, it will be bad not only for the environment, but also for the stability of electricity supply.
This is especially true considering that nuclear power is generated cleanly and cheaply and does not require maintaining emergency stocks of fuel.
Pending an environmental impact assessment, the site for the nation’s third liquefied natural gas terminal has yet to be decided. The DPP’s nuclear-free homeland plan aims to generate 50 percent of electricity at gas-fired power plants within the coming eight years. Given the delay, this will be hard to achieve.
Without an ample supply of electricity, the measures that Premier William Lai (賴清德) has announced in response to the “five industrial shortages” — labor, skilled professionals, electricity, water and land — will merely be empty words.
For example, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co plans to build a 3-nanometer chip plant in Tainan, which would boost its electricity demand by 21 gigawatt-hours, or 85 percent, within the next 10 years. If electricity supply develops along current lines, TSMC will pack up and leave Taiwan.
It took 18 years to build the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮) at a cost of NT$283.8 billion (US$9.45 billion at the current exchange rate). Three years ago, construction was halted under the government’s nuclear-free homeland policy, and Taiwan Power Co has had to spend NT$3.4 billion per year to keep the plant in mothballs. That is a big waste of taxpayers’ money.
The power plant’s installed capacity is 2.7 gigawatts (GW). If it were to start operations with a utilization rate of 90 percent and operate throughout the year for a total of 7,880 hours, it would generate 21.276 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity, which equals 8 percent of Taiwan’s total power generation of 264.114TWh last year.
Based on Taiwan’s electricity emission factor for last year of 0.529kg of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour, generating that amount of electricity from the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant would cut emissions by 11.3 million tonnes, which is 4.4 percent of the total 258.17 million tonnes of emissions that Taiwan produced last year.
The nations’s four nuclear power plants, with their total capacity of 7.844GW, could generate 61.811TWh per year, or 23.4 percent of all electricity, and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 32.8 million tonnes, or 12.7 percent of the total.
The DPP should consider suspending its nuclear-free homeland policy, which is bad for both economic development and environmental protection.
Lu Shyi-min is a retired energy policy researcher at the Industrial Technology Research Institute’s Green Energy and Environment Laboratories.
Translated by Julian Clegg
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while