Thu, May 28, 2026 page8

• If the lights are off, Taiwan loses

  • By Jonathan Walberg Ethan Connel
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  The Ministry of the Interior, working with the navy and coast guard, is organizing Taiwan’s first joint exercise simulating escort tankers carrying liquefied natural gas (LNG) and oil through a Chinese blockade. The drills simulate fuel transport along three maritime corridors leading toward Japan, the Philippines and the US. Deputy Minister of the Interior Sawyer Mars (馬士元) said that a blockade of the Taiwan Strait would amount to “almost a 100 percent blockade of the regional energy supply.”

  Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo said planning to counter a blockade is standard practice in Taipei.

  While the exercise is limited in scale, its significance is considerable. For years, Taiwan’s defense discussions have focused on the military hardware needed to withstand an amphibious assault. This emphasis has overshadowed another threat: A coercive campaign targeting fuel and electricity instead of territory. Energy resilience, once viewed primarily as an economic issue, is central to Taiwan’s ability to withstand sustained pressure from Beijing.

  Modern militaries depend on electricity. Air-defense radar, command-and-control, naval port operations and the industrial base that produces ammunition and parts all require a stable grid, as does the public. Taiwan imports more than 97 percent of its energy, with almost no domestic production of oil, gas or coal. Natural gas generates about 43 percent of Taiwan’s electricity and coal about 35 percent. Both are delivered by sea.

  Taiwan operates three LNG terminals: Yung-An in Kaohsiung, Taichung and the new Guantang facility in Taoyuan, which began commercial operations last year. That is more redundancy than Taiwan had a year ago, but the system still funnels through a small number of physical sites that ships must reach through contested waters. Storage remains limited. Taiwan’s statutory minimum security stockpile for natural gas is rising to 14 days by next year, and reported buffer levels early this year ran in the 10 to 11 day range. Japan, by contrast, holds roughly two months of gas. Coal inventories in Taiwan can sustain generation for about seven weeks. Strategic oil reserves are larger (about 150 days between government and industry holdings), but oil cannot easily replace gas in Taiwan’s power mix.

  An amphibious invasion of Taiwan would be among the most demanding operations in military history. However, Beijing has coercive options that are cheaper and less aggressive. A maritime blockade or selective interdiction campaign targeting fuel imports would not require Chinese forces to seize territory outright. It would require the ability to sustain pressure at sea long enough to strain Taiwan’s economy, electrical grid and political system. The Chinese military has trained for precisely this scenario, with exercises last year and the year before that simulated disruptions of commercial shipping that defense analysts widely interpreted as a rehearsal for a future maritime energy siege.

  Wargames might show what such a campaign could do. In Lights Out? Wargaming a Chinese Blockade of Taiwan, published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in July last year, analysts ran 26 blockade scenarios. They simulated that as coal stockpiles ran out near week nine, Taiwan’s electricity production could fall to roughly 20 percent of pre-blockade levels — barely enough for emergency services and well below the threshold at which manufacturing, including semiconductor fabrication, could continue. By week 26, with oil reserves depleted, the figure dropped further. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), in its study Maritime Protection of Taiwan’s Energy Vulnerability in November last year modeled a slower “gray zone” squeeze that combined cyberoperations and selective interdiction without a kinetic blockade, and reached convergent conclusions.

  These are scenarios, not predictions. Real-world frictions, including Beijing’s own escalation risks, allied responses and civilian adaptation, would shape the outcome. However, the consistent finding across multiple exercises is difficult to ignore: Within weeks of a sustained interdiction campaign, Taiwan’s electrical grid would come under severe strain, with cascading effects on industry, society and military operations.

  Strategists usually frame deterrence in terms of the costs an attacker can be made to pay. Taiwan’s missile and drone investments are aimed at that side of the ledger. However, deterrence also rests on what the defender can absorb. If Beijing’s planners conclude they could force a political crisis in Taipei by squeezing energy imports for a few weeks, without firing a missile, coercion looks more attractive. If Taipei can demonstrate that it would keep the lights on, the hospitals running and the radar online for months under interdiction, the cost-and-time calculation on the Chinese side gets less attractive.

  This is where Taiwan’s planning has lagged. Taipei has invested seriously in asymmetric capabilities, including anti-ship missiles, drones and mobile launchers designed to make an invasion expensive. Energy infrastructure has not been treated with the same seriousness. Reserve mandates are among the lowest in the developed world. Defense and energy policy still sit in separate bureaucracies that rarely meet on the same problem.

  Some of that is starting to change. In March, Taipower submitted plans to the Nuclear Safety Commission to restart shuttered reactors, beginning with the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant in Pingtung County and then the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City. The first units are not expected to come back online before 2028 and Guosheng would likely run a year behind that. Surging electricity demand from artificial intelligence and semiconductor manufacturing, combined with a sharper read of geopolitical risk, pushed Taiwan’s leadership to revisit a politically difficult decision. The country is most exposed in the years between now and then.

  The escort drills announced this month help, but they are a single piece of a larger picture. Several steps would close more of the gap:

  The first priority is storage. Reserves sized for peacetime are inadequate for a prolonged interdiction. Taiwan should target at least 30 days of LNG storage and expand receiving capacity, particularly on the less-exposed east coast.

  The second priority is source diversification. While nuclear restarts should help, distributed energy resources such as rooftop solar, behind-the-meter batteries and microgrids that operate independently of the main grid are more resilient to targeted attacks.

  Third, institutional integration is needed. Energy continuity should be a stated objective in Taiwan’s annual Han Kuang military exercises, with joint civilian-military drills simulating gas delivery interruptions of 30, 60 and 90 days.

  Fourth, allied coordination is essential. The FDD report recommends that Washington begin contingency planning for tanker reflagging and convoy escort, modeled on the 1987 reflagging of Kuwaiti tankers during the Iran-Iraq War, and that the US, Japan and the Philippines establish legal and operational frameworks for emergency maritime corridors. These steps require planning, not immediate deployment, to avoid improvisation during a crisis. Fifth, infrastructure hardening is critical. LNG terminals, large fuel depots and key power plants are vulnerable targets. Physical protection, redundancy and rapid-repair capabilities should receive investment comparable to air and missile defense.

  Taiwan’s defense debate has long argued about whether it needs more submarines or more drones, more fighters or more mines. Each of those debates assumes the grid keeps running long enough for any weapon to matter. A blockade is a different kind of threat from an invasion. It moves slowly, resists easy military rebuttal and aims to wear down the defender without provoking the international response amphibious assault would. Resisting it depends less on Taiwan’s order of battle than on its energy reserves, the redundancy of its infrastructure and how seriously its government has planned for months of disruption. The escort drills are a beginning. The harder work is investment, institutional integration and the political decision to treat energy security as a defense responsibility. Powering Taiwan through a crisis is a precondition for defending it through one.

  Jonathan Walberg is associate director of Taiwan Security Monitor, a doctoral student at the University of Virginia and a fellow at the Center for Security Policy Studies. Ethan Connell is an assistant director at Taiwan Security Monitor and a graduate student at George Mason University. His research focuses on maritime security and cross-strait military affairs.
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