It has been just over a year since massive blackouts hit Taiwan. Soon after yet another blackout on March 3, the Ministry of Economic Affairs put forward a NT$100 billion (US$3.39 billion) budget to improve the power grid, including direct supply of regional power to science parks, accelerating renewable energy grid integration, consolidating the grid, grouping junction substations, resolving power supply bottlenecks and building indoor substations.
Many of them are projects that have been ongoing for some time. The government has made promises — as it does every time a major power outage happens — that it will invest billions to increase grid resilience, such as the Smart Grid Master Plan announced in 2011 that is estimated to cost NT$139.9 billion, the NT$16.3 billion power distribution resilience plan in 2018 and the recently announced NT$100 billion plan.
Investment is helpful in solving problems and hopefully Taiwan Power Co will complete the key infrastructure upgrades.
The causes of power grid outages include natural disasters, which are low-probability, high-impact events such as typhoons, earthquakes and floods, with their intensity, location and duration difficult to predict; or high-probability, low-impact problems such as generator system or transmission line failures.
Grid resilience, which includes infrastructure resilience and operational resilience, is the ability to avoid and recover quickly from accidents. Grid resilience indicators based on operational performance include the extent and number of households affected by power outages; the duration of power supply suspension to communications, water and health services; and time to recovery.
The root causes of the major power outages are not insufficient capacity or transmission lines, but employee negligence, grid structure and system equipment maintenance. To tackle these issues, grid resilience needs to be increased comprehensively, which can be achieved through grid strengthening and adaptation, immediate response, grid modernization and sustainability.
Operational grid resilience is the ability to prepare for, adapt to and resist accidents, and the ability to quickly recover from disturbances, using smart grid technology under changing conditions, and reducing the number of affected households and the duration of outages.
What needs to be improved is operational grid resilience, which depends on personnel training, and professional capabilities in power grid planning and operations, not just investment in hardware.
In response to power outages caused by accidents, power companies should formulate quantitative indicators of operational resilience for individual areas of power generation, transmission and distribution systems as a reference for deploying the most effective investment
The annual power grid operation resilience quantitative index based on the actual power generation, transmission and distribution operational results can show the benefits of software and hardware investments.
If the investment is to be more reflected in reliability of power supply, in addition to investment in key power infrastructure, improvements in work culture, personnel training, overall power supply risk assessment, and smart grid technology and functions will also be necessary.
The government should set up an expert supervision mechanism on grid reliability and resilience to manage its security, design and operations, so that a resilient, flexible grid can be created.
Lu Chan-nan is a professor in National Sun Yat-sen University’s electrical engineering department and a former president of the Taiwan Power and Energy Engineering Association.
Translated by Lin Lee-kai
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