Taiwan’s power supply would be impacted by climate change and rising industrial requirements, Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) chairman Tseng Wen-sheng (曾文生) said at the first meeting of the National Climate Change Response Committee on Thursday.
The climate change committee is one of the three committees — the other two being the Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience Committee and the Healthy Taiwan Promotion Committee — set up by President William Lai (賴清德) in June to help implement his policy promises.
Tseng, one of the two presenters at the first meeting, said Taipower had lowered the electricity carbon emissions factor — the level of emissions generated by producing every kilowatt-hour of power — from 0.554 in 2017 to 0.494 last year.
Photo: Chu Pei-hsiung, Taipei Times
“We’re expecting to further lower it to 0.3 by 2035,” he said.
Tseng said that the company has also improved in maintaining a stable power supply.
The number of days the percent operating reserve (POR) was less than 6 percent fell from 80 days in 2016 and 104 days in 2017 to between zero and 17 days annually between 2020 and last year.
The POR is an indicator measuring daily power supply reliability. A POR lower than 6 percent signals a rising possibility of power rationing.
The improvement was down to boosting renewable energy supply and the number of gas-fired generators, Tseng said.
However, rising power use would challenge power supply, “as many worry whether our power generation system will be able to keep up with our semiconductor industry, artificial intelligence technologies and electric vehicles,” he said.
Tseng said that while Taipower has been increasing new power sources, there are still uncertainties.
“The market for natural gas generators has become a ‘seller’s market’ as the world is replacing coal with natural gas,” Tseng said, referring to the increasing difficulty of obtaining gas-fired generators.
Given many private power companies are scheduled to stop generating power with coal due to pollution regulations, the lack of human resources for Taipower’s planned construction, environmental assessments and communication with local governments over various licenses are also expected to have an impact, Tseng said.
He also raised the challenge of climate change to maintaining stable power supply.
Taipower has primarily focused on enhancing power grids by updating existing equipment, constructing new facilities and implementing diversification strategies, he said.
However, besides human-related factors such as local resistance, the impact of climate change, for example stronger typhoons or lightning, is also likely to cause concern, he added.
“While we have built new protections against lightning for our transmission towers, the problem now is that lightning is getting stronger to the point that the level of protection might not be sufficient,” Tseng said.
Boosting the level of protection is expected to require a lot of effort, he said.
Tseng’s report was preceded by Minister of Environment Peng Chi-ming’s (彭啟明) report on how climate change could impact the world and Taiwan.
He cited The Climate Change Scientific Report 2024 published by the National Science and Technology Council and the Ministry of Environment in May, which warned that the nation would face longer summers and fewer, but more severe typhoons if action is not taken.
Peng also stressed the importance of having a “trinity” climate change response policy of disaster prevention, net zero efforts and adaptation.
“We have some experience in [the former], but adaptation has so far not been discussed much, so there is room for improvement concerning risk assessment and budget arrangement regarding that,” he said.
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