1st climate change committee meeting discusses power supply, climate change

Taipei, Aug. 8 (CNA) Taiwan's power supply will be impacted by climate change and rising industrial need, Taiwan Power Co. (Taipower) Chairman Tseng Wen-sheng (曾文生) said at the first meeting of the National Climate Change Response Committee under the Presidential Office 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 Lai Ching-te (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 kgCOe/kWh in 2017 to 0.494 in 2023.

"We're expecting to further lower it to 0.3 by 2035," he said.

The Taipower chairman said 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 2020-2023.

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 will challenge our 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 added.

The Taipower head pointed out that while the company has been increasing new power sources and estimated supply would be sufficient until 2023, 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-fired ones," he said, referring to the increasing difficulty of obtaining them.

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 stable power supply.

In recent years, the company 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 lighting, is also likely to cause concern, Tseng added.

"In recent years, 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 may not be sufficient," he said.

Boosting the level of protection is expected to require a lot of effort, Tseng stressed.

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, in which it is warned that the country would face longer summers and fewer but more severe typhoons if action is not taken.

The minister 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 two], but adaptation has so far not been discussed much, so there is room for improvement concerning risk assessment and budget arrangement regarding that," Peng said.