Carbon

Taiwan diary: Renewable energy 101

Time Stamp: March 29, 2023 7:00 AM
Source Node: 2459775

Republished By Plato

Yi-Ting Lu and Ching-Wen Huang both started out as activists in Taiwan’s environmental movement.

Now they spend their working days on the 37th floor of Taipei 101 – the 508 metre tall tower that houses a who’s who of multinational corporations.

They are associates at the Renewable Consulting Group – a key player in facilitating investment in offshore wind farms in Taiwan.

The views from the tower block are extraordinary – but an ever-present soupy haze is a reminder that reducing emissions is not the only reason that the young are pinning their hopes on a rapid transition to renewables.

Ching-Wen Huang (left) and Yi-Ting Lu

Huang, who joined the firm in 2019, says the uptake of wind generation has been among the most rapid in the Asia Pacific market.

There’s approximately a gigawatt of offshore wind already operating and another 5.5 GW in the pipeline.

Taiwan’s Bureau of Energy has begun a series of auctions for the supply of 3 GW of offshore energy with the final auction due to take place next year.

The auctions will see 1.5 GW of energy added to the grid each year between 2026 to 2031.

All going to plan Taiwan will reach 14.7 GW of installed offshore wind capacity by 2031, surpassing both Japan and South Korea.

Companies bidding for the wind generation are required to meet a localisation requirement. Wind farms that come into operation in the 2026/27 period must source 60% of goods and services locally with the percentage going up over time.

There is also government support for R & D carried by locally companies.

Solar is next off the rank in the race to a fully renewable electricity sector. The government has set a target of 20 GW by 2025. Currently there is about 8 GW in place.

Huang says there is limited land available for solar farms and initial plans that would have seen forestry and farm land used for solar panels came in for stiff opposition.

Now the target is for 12 GW of that 20 GW target being met with rooftop solar.

Geothermal power is also being explored. Taiwan Power set up a geothermal power plant in 1981 but shut it due to corrrosion in 1993.

Yi-Ting Lu says geothermal energy development is still in the very early stages – with just one privately owned generator currently.

But meeting the net zero 2050 target is going to require utilising every possible renewable energy source available.

Lu, who is finishing up a three year stint on the board of Taiwan Youth Climate Coalition, says NGOs and climate activists are generally supportive of the government’s efforts to reduce emissions but feel it isn’t doing enough on the adaptation and just transition side of the equation.

“They want the government to be more ambitious.”

Huang says the giant semiconductor company TSMC is both Taiwan’s single biggest energy user and part of the solution to mitigating climate change.

Most of the digital technologies being developed to help people and companies make smarter decisions on how they consume energy depend on state of the art semiconductors and TSMC is by far the largest producer of them globally.

As a former protester and former climate change adviser at KPMG he’s come to the opinion that corporate pressure is the main driver of change at companies like TSMC.

But the pressure from corporates, like Apple, is often as the result of pressure from the public and activist groups like Greenpeache.

“I know a lot of people say the work done by the likes of KPMG is greenwashing and I joined the renewable industry because I wanted to be involved in something real. But corporate procurement power is driving change.

“Companies supplying corporates like Apple need to secure a renewable energy supply.”

Lu agrees. She says in her experience governments are slower to respond to lobbying by people power than multi-nationals. It’s Apple that has forced TSCM to start puchasing renewable energy not the government.

…………………………..

Jeremy Rose is currently in Taiwan and travelled there with assistance from the Asia New Zealand Foundation.