Editor’s Note: This is the last instalment in the Star’s “View from Taiwan” series. Read the rest of the seriesTAIPEI—On their descent to Taipei’s international airport, passengers can spot dozens of white windmills towering above buildings, turning slowly in the same direction along the island’s lush coastline.
To take advantage of these conditions, the wind farms that generate energy to power more than 100,000 Taiwanese households are located in the Taiwan Strait or along the island’s west coast. Constant monitoring of the windmills — plus billions of dollars in investments from the world’s richest countries — are factors that could deter conflict with mainland China, experts in Taiwan told the Star.
If China’s army were to blockade Taiwan, the island would only have enough energy to sustain itself for two weeks. That’s according to Richard Chen, Taiwan’s former deputy defence minister, in an“In two weeks, Taiwan would start to go dark,” Chen said. “No electricity, no phones, no internet. And people would start to go hungry.”
A meeting in November between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden, the first since Biden took office, was widely seen as a necessary cooling of tensions, butTaiwan Democratic Progressive Party legislator Hung San-han said in an interview that his government indeed has an “emergency plan” in the event that China may blockade the island to stop the flow of essential supplies rather than attempt a full-on invasion.
Jyun-yi Lee, a researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, said Taiwan has been preparing for the “possibility” of a blockade for decades. Inspired by a similar program in Germany, the act introduced a feed-in tariff system to provide small-scale renewable energy developers with above-market prices for delivering energy to the grid.
Some countries in the EU have accelerated plans to shift more of their power mix to renewable energy sources. For five hours on Oct. 7, Greece ran entirely on renewable energy for the first time in its history, a milestone that analystswas a sign that a renewables-dominated electricity grid was within sight, even in Europe’s smaller economies.
Chia Wei-Chao, assistant professor in National Taiwan University’s climate change and sustainable development program, argues that there are several blind spots in the government’s energy policies.
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