A nationwide blackout on Thursday left 5.49 million households and businesses, mostly in the south, without power. Although the outage caused serious damage to companies in industrial parks in Kaohsiung and Tainan — ranging from electronics manufacturers and steel producers to petrochemical firms, as well as the agricultural and fishing sectors in Pingtung County — crucial semiconductor and information technology sectors were largely unaffected, as they are either in science parks in northern or central Taiwan or have their own power generation systems.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), Minister of Economic Affairs Wang Mei-hua (王美花) and Taiwan Power’s (Taipower) management apologized for the incident, which they attributed to human error.
However, the latest incident — the third massive blackout in two years and the most serious since 2017 — has again heightened concerns over the government’s pledge to provide a stable electricity supply, putting the nation’s target for achieving higher domestic investment at risk.
The mishandling of switches at Kaohsiung’s Hsinta Power Plant (興達電廠) on Thursday during its annual maintenance caused the generators to trip, which in turn tripped circuit breakers at Tainan’s Longqi Extra High Voltage Substation (龍崎超高壓變電所) in Tainan, eventually causing several power plants in the south to shut down, cutting out one-third of the nation’s electricity supply.
Nationwide blackouts seem to have become routine in the past few years, resulting in unnecessary losses for households and businesses. The previous massive outage was on Aug. 15, 2017, affecting 5.92 million households, and major blackouts on May 13 and May 17 last year caused 4.15 million and 1 million users to lose power respectively. Unlike outages caused by typhoons, heavy rains or earthquakes, almost all major blackouts in the past few years stemmed from operational negligence.
Last week’s incident appeared to be an equipment malfunction at first glance, but an initial Taipower investigation found that plant personnel failed to follow standard operating procedures for maintenance and repairs. With negligence playing a major role in outages, it is clear that Taipower is in crisis, with problems ranging from corporate culture to management, equipment maintenance and power grid construction.
The outages should not have happened. The government should hold those culpable to account, and seriously review the nation’s grid stability and the resilience of its key power infrastructure. The safety management and maintenance of power plants, and the design and stability of power grids, are crucial to the government’s goal of transforming Taiwan’s electricity supply by 2025.
The government has in the past few years allocated many resources and put great effort into the development of new energy sources, such as offshore wind farms and solar power plants. The reality is that existing power plants and substations are aging, and they urgently need to be upgraded or renewed, but those projects have encountered repeated delays during construction for either regulatory or environmental reasons, which explains why people have rising concerns about the nation’s electricity supply.
Taiwan’s network of power transmission and distribution facilities is vulnerable. Some experts have suggested creating smart and regional power grids to diversify risk and limit the effects of a malfunction, rather than using a centralized system, relying on a few big power plants. If human error is inevitable, then the nation’s power grid has to be more resilient.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Keelung Mayor George Hsieh (謝國樑) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Tuesday last week apologized over allegations that the former director of the city’s Civil Affairs Department had illegally accessed citizens’ data to assist the KMT in its campaign to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors. Given the public discontent with opposition lawmakers’ disruptive behavior in the legislature, passage of unconstitutional legislation and slashing of the central government’s budget, civic groups have launched a massive campaign to recall KMT lawmakers. The KMT has tried to fight back by initiating campaigns to recall DPP lawmakers, but the petition documents they
RSS