The government would assess the feasibility of moving Taiwan’s power cables underground to better protect them from damage from typhoons and other extreme weather events, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said at an event in Taitung yesterday.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs and state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) would carry out preliminary planning and assessments related to the issue, Cho said.
Power outages affected more than 300,000 households as Typhoon Podul cut across southern Taiwan on Wednesday, while more than 1 million households faced outages during Typhoon Danas early last month, he said.
Photo: Johnson Liu, AFP
If power cables were all underground, people would no longer face widespread outages during typhoons, and Taipower employees would not have to risk their lives climbing power poles in heavy rain, he said.
More than 40 percent of the nation’s power lines, including those on outlying islands, were already underground as of the end of 2023, Taipower data showed.
It was unclear why Cho said Taiwan would “begin” to assess the feasibility of moving cables underground when a relatively high percentage are already below the surface, and he did not say if there was a particular group of cables he was referring to.
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