On Thursday last week, the whole of Taiwan, from south to north, was hit by a series of power outages.
The outages happened just as Ukraine was being bombed by Russia, while Ukrainians remain unbowed and determined to block the Russian invasion, even if it means standing in front of tanks or defusing landmines with their bare hands. They also coincided with the visit to Taiwan of former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who strongly supported Taiwan against China while he was in office.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) awarded Pompeo with Taiwan’s top civilian honor — the Order of Brilliant Star with Special Grand Cordon — but the planned live Web cast of the award ceremony had to be canceled because of the power cuts.
There were reports that certain lawmakers in the Legislative Yuan cheered and clapped as the power outages took place. The more sensitive among us might wonder whether the power outages had something to do with Taiwan facing a similar fate to Ukraine, or with the supportive visit to Taiwan by a delegation of political heavyweights from former US administrations. Suspicious folk might wonder whether the outages were arranged by someone who is unhappy about these events.
Electricity and the power grid are matters of national security, especially in a highly modernized nation. Last week’s outages were the most damaging for Taiwan since those that followed the 921 Earthquake in 1999. That earthquake, which caused power outages nationwide, was a once-in-two-centuries natural disaster, so the power cuts were caused by a natural disaster, not human error. That is not true of last week’s outages.
Last week’s blackouts halted production at many factories, prevented shops from trading and made it impossible for office workers to do their jobs. In Kaohsiung — the hardest-hit area — the sound of ambulance sirens started not long after the power went off and went on for quite a while. The Kaohsiung MRT metropolitan railway system stopped running and traffic lights stopped working. Although high-speed rail services were running more or less as normal, the big question was how to get to the station. To make matters worse, the water supply was cut off in most of Kaohsiung, while the Internet was either not working or very slow.
Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) called on state-owned Taiwan Power Co to review how it operates the national grid. Because southern Taiwan supplies electricity to cities and counties in the north, whenever the power supply fails to meet the demand, northern areas get priority access, while southern cities such as Kaohsiung and Taitung are automatically demoted to second-class citizen status and have to go without electricity and water.
Chen questioned the fairness of that arrangement.
During the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) authoritarian rule, southern Taiwan became the main manufacturing region for various important heavy industries, such as iron, steel, petrochemicals and shipbuilding. This has led to long-term pollution of the region’s air, water and soil, and of the ocean.
Chen’s reaction to the blackouts was too polite. Power distribution is unfair when electricity generated by power stations that pollute Kaohsiung is delivered to northern Taiwan while Kaohsiung does not have enough electricity for its own needs. Not only that, the distribution of water resources, taxation and educational resources are clearly unfair to people living in the south.
Sources of electricity include hydroelectric, thermal, nuclear, wind and solar power. Taiwan has limited sources of hydroelectric power and the international trend is to move away from nuclear power. Thermal power poses the problems of carbon dioxide emissions and air pollution, and the EU is set to impose a tax on carbon emissions.
The remaining renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power, have two major problems — the installable capacity is limited by the size and number of available sites and by their smaller generation capacity, and their power generation capacity is further limited by changeable weather and the cyclical nature of the seasons.
One step toward solving these problems would be to install many more offshore wind turbines, especially placing them in deeper waters of more than 30m. Another step would be to overcome technical obstructions to mass storage of energy.
Importantly, exports are to be examined for the proportion of renewable or green power used in their production, but 90 percent of Taiwan’s green electricity is reserved for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, so what are other companies supposed to do?
Taiwan does not only need sufficient electricity, as an export-oriented economy it needs green electricity. The government needs to think about how all this green electricity can be produced.
If Taiwan can build a coal-to-gas thermal power generating unit at a cost of hundreds of billions of New Taiwan dollars, why can’t it spend half that sum developing the nation’s untapped green energy resources?
Lee Hsien-hua is a distinguished professor in National Sun Yat-sen University’s Department of Marine Environment and Engineering.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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