Taiwan wants to become greener, also as a weapon against China

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  Sjoerd den Daas

  correspondent China

A white steel wall is rising in one of the most geopolitically charged places in Asia. Windmills at sea, in the middle of the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan wants to become greener, and at the same time hopes to become less dependent on energy from abroad. In the port of Taichung, the engineers are ready to set sail.

“Even though you have to deal with severe storms, summer is quite comfortable,” says Jay Peng, operations manager at Ørsted in Taiwan. “In winter we have a lot of wind, high waves. When the weather is like now, it is difficult to go out,” he says, during a tour of the immense vessel that the Danish energy giant had built for the development of wind farms in the Taiwan Strait.

For now, the crew is on standby for the trip, which normally takes about four to five hours. There is no going out today. In fact, the port of Taichung is closing. The measured wind speed is above 20 meters per second. “That happens regularly here,” says Peng. An oil tanker belonging to Chinese Petroleum Corporation, the Taiwanese oil giant, is the last to dock.

The ambitions are high in Taiwan. With a planned expansion of 39 gigawatts over the next five years, neighboring China is a good deal bigger. The 6.6 Gigawatt that Taiwan wants to install is still good for place 2 in Asia. Ørsted supplies part of that. “111 wind turbines, enough to provide 1 million households with green energy,” says Christy Wang, manager of the company.

Many dozens of windmills have already been installed, a smaller part is waiting on the quay until the winter is over. Those flying to or from Taipei have a good chance of seeing the wind turbines of the first large offshore wind farm, not far from the northwest coast of the island. That was child’s play, says Wang. “The current project is located 35 to 50 kilometers from the coast. The scale, the distances: everything is bigger.”

And: wind speeds are much higher. “There is a tunneling effect between Taiwan and mainland China,” explains Wang. Attractive for power generation, but a complicating factor for its installation. And there are more challenges. “In the North Sea, the sea is less deep, the seabed is easier to work with,” says Frank Spee of Hailong, which will be building in the same area. “An underwater dune landscape”, he calls the Taiwan Strait.

If China plans a military invasion of Taiwan, the island would be without power very quickly.

The government in Taipei wants it to become ‘Taiwan First’ in the wind sector, with homegrown champions. “They want us to produce components like foundations and wind turbines locally here,” says Spee. “So we are not just building a project, but an entire industry. Exciting and challenging,” he says with a sense of understatement. Because those requirements significantly slow down the development of offshore wind.

Left or right, it will become more sustainable in Taiwan. Earlier this month, a law was passed that states that the de facto independent island must be climate neutral by 2050: 40 percent of its energy must be generated from wind energy. Another 20 percent should come from other renewable sources, such as solar energy.

Figures for the past year are not yet available, but in 2021, according to the Taiwanese Energy Bureau, 97.7 percent of energy needs had to be sourced from abroad. Although wind is slowly gaining ground, more than 80 percent of Taiwan’s electricity currently comes from imported coal and gas. Which doesn’t help: the last nuclear power plant will close in 2025.

Taiwan’s deputy economy minister Tseng Wen-Sheng said earlier that he wants to expand gas and coal reserves to strengthen the island’s resilience. Because no one will deny that the island is vulnerable. Certainly not after last summer. China then practiced for a blockade around the island after Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.

Something that has not gone unnoticed by the wind farm builders, although its direct impact has been limited so far. Navy ships say they have not yet seen them near the park at sea. “Of course the recent incidents and events are new to us, but not to the people of Taiwan,” said Wang, who invested 165 billion Taiwanese dollars in the project with Ørsted, about 5 billion euros.

“We not only look at the construction, but also at the benefits over the next thirty years,” she says. “It is mainly a question for banks that want to invest,” says Spee van Hailong about the high tensions. “You notice that the reaction is a bit more reserved. But in the longer term it is still seen as an attractive project.” The wallet is still being pulled, he wants to say.

What helps: private companies crave, whether or not forced, for the sustainably generated electricity. “In our case, two-thirds of the power is sold to a single company,” says Spee. One of the big chip giants, several of which are located in Taichung. “They have an enormous appetite for energy and have to switch to green energy from their end customers, the large tech companies.”

An armed conflict with China will also have far-reaching consequences for the global economy. The Taiwanese chip manufacturer TSMC makes something that no other country can do.