Taiwan starts shifting focus to harnessing solar energy

Can it hold on to its solar ambition?

Just when the race to harnessing the power of the sun is heating up, Taiwan aggressively enters the playing field with an ambitious target installation of 500MW solar-powered equipment this year.

Taiwan's Bureau of Energy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs revealed the target to encourage the private sector to further install more solar-power generation equipment--something which the agency has been doing for six years now. Last year, the country's installed capacity hit 500MW, a whopping surge from 2010's measly 70MW.

According to BOE officials, the average viable period to generate solar power is 1,250 hours which translates to roughly 14% of 8,760 hours in a year.

However, here's the catch: the big dream of the 500MW solar power installation target calls for a total investment of US$1.36b at least.

Can solar, along with renewable technologies, provide enough electricity to offset the loss of nuclear power in Taiwan--while allowing Taiwan to meet its emissions reductions commitments?

Jonathan Cobb of the World Nuclear Association says that the solution to the energy market’s problems will need to make the best use of a wide range of generation and supply technologies, and that will include nuclear. “Nuclear power has a very important role to play through supplying electricity that is low carbon and can be delivered securely and reliably.”

Timothy Ferry from AmCham Taipei says that nuclear plants currently generate more than 38,000GWh of electricity annually, making up 18% of Taiwan’s total power supply. “The scale of the challenge is enormous. Researchers at the Industrial Economics and Knowledge Center (IEK) under the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) estimate that to generate enough power to replace nuclear energy, Taiwan would need to install 55GW of solar PV, requiring some 700 square kilometres of land,”

“It’s quite difficult to replace nuclear power in the really short run, because we aren’t ready in terms of the whole infrastructure, and also the capacity of renewable energy is quite low right now,” says Wen Lih-chyi, director and research fellow at the Center for Green Economy at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research. She adds that new energy technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells are “not really commercialised yet.”