President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) must push large electricity consumers to install certain ratios of renewable energy sources during her second term, Greenpeace Taiwan said yesterday.
After the Renewable Energy Development Act (再生能源發展條例) was significantly overhauled in May last year, the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) in February announced draft regulations that require major electricity consumers — those that have a contract capacity of more than 5,000 megawatts — to use at least 10 percent of renewable power in five years.
The announcement’s notification period ended on April 1, but the ministry has yet to give a timetable for the rule’s implementation, Greenpeace Taiwan said.
The draft regulations should have been announced in November last year — six months after the act was amended, as per the Executive Yuan’s administrative procedure, Greenpeace climate and energy campaign director Lena Chang (張皪心) said.
The ministry has said the draft regulations could not be implemented because of different opinions it received, Chang said, asking if that means it only collected opinions from businesses.
Greenpeace had not been not been invited to the ministry’s meetings on the draft regulations, she said.
Even if the proposed regulations are implemented, they might not be of much help with the nation’s renewable power growth, Greenpeace campaign specialist Alynne Tsai (蔡篤慰) said.
Nearly 300 businesses are defined as large electricity consumers, and they consume nearly 50 percent of the nation’s electricity, but under the proposed regulations, the minimum renewable power that they would have to install would bring less than 1 percent growth in renewable power capacity by 2025, she said.
Even so, the regulations are vital to push big users to switch to renewables and to realize Tsai administration’s goal of generating 20 percent of the nation’s electricity from renewable power sources by 2025, she said.
Greenpeace Taiwan on Monday petitioned the Control Yuan to begin an investigation into whether the ministry had been derelict in its duties by delaying the implementation of the regulations.
Up to 85.5 percent of respondents to a poll conducted by the organization said that the proposed regulations would help expedite the nation’s energy transformation, Greenpeace Taiwan said.
The increased costs for developing renewable energy should be covered by businesses that use more electricity, 44.6 percent of the respondents said, while 29.8 percent said that the costs should be borne by all users.
The poll, which was conducted on April 28 and 29, collected 1,078 valid samples through household telephones.
It has a confidence level of 95 percent and a margin of error of 2.98 percentage points.
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