Stop idling, Taiwan
Having spent 18 months teaching English in Taichung, I’m concerned about Taiwan’s future if the air quality does not improve. Children who should be able to run and play for hours end up coughing because of the congestion in their lungs. I realize that industry is the cause of most of the pollution, but there is something the average person can do.
It’s a fact that vehicles, when idling, do not run efficiently and expel more exhaust than when driving. A vehicle that idles for more than 20 seconds wastes gas and pollutes. The solution is simple: Many of Taiwan’s traffic lights show the time left until traffic will move. If a vehicle arrives at a stop signal with more than 20 seconds showing on the display, turn your car or scooter engine off. When the display hits 10 seconds, turn it back on. When you are picking up your children from school, turn the engine off. When you are stopping to buy a drink, turn the engine off. In fact, turn it off any time you will be stopped longer than 10 seconds.
It is estimated that the average vehicle using this method could save NT$10,000 in fuel per year and alleviate unnecessary wear and tear on engines. Modern vehicles do not need to idle. Here is a Web site that gives some great information: www.makealeap.org/idling_myth.
Since moving to Taiwan, I have developed asthma and serious lung problems. Sadly, I will have to leave because I can’t breathe. I have loved living here. The people are amazing, the country is so beautiful and the culture is so wonderfully different.
Please, for the sake of the nation’s children, do your part to reduce harmful carbon emissions. I have written to the Ministry of Environment [sic] with this suggestion. If you agree, please e-mail them as well.
JOANNE ROSEN
Taichung
Numbers don’t add up
In his article (“Embracing a non-nuclear future,” April 4, page 8) former Environmental Protection Agency minister Winston Dang (陳重信) said that if renewable energy output in Taiwan could be raised to 25 percent of total electricity production, there would be no reason why a future administration headed by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential hopeful Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) could not phase out nuclear energy. That would mean raising the output of renewables from 9 terawatt (TW) hours to 58TW hours from the annual total for electricity production of 229.7TW hours. Let us consider how that scale of output could be achieved by means of four sources of energy: combined-cycle gas turbines, onshore wind farms, offshore wind farms and solar photovoltaic.
The 58TW hours target could be achieved by 14 top-class combined-cycle, multi-shaft gas turbines (848 megawatts [MW] each operating at 58 percent efficiency) for a capital cost very similar to the Longmen nuclear power plant (NT$280 billion [US$9.56 billion]) covering approximately 7km2.
In reference to an onshore wind farm facility, and extrapolating from data pertaining to the Enercon E-126 turbine with a power rating of 7MW, Dang’s target of 58TW hours annually would require 2,478 such mega-turbines, operating at 30 percent efficiency on 398km2 of land at a capital cost just shy of NT$57 billion. While the capital cost is much cheaper than the gas option, such a wind farm would require 40 percent more land than Taipei City.
To extrapolate from the published figures for the UK’s largest offshore wind farm, the London Array (NT$91 billion; 1,000MW power rating; 195km2), such a wind farm in Taiwan, assuming it would operate at 30 percent efficiency, could generate 58 TW hours annually only if its power rating was increased to 19,400MW — which would mean so many turbines as to consume 3,770km2 at a capital cost of NT$1.8 trillion. That’s the size of 14 Taipei Cities — at sea!
Taking our bearings from the Lhuju solar plant, 58TW hours a year could only be generated by so many such plants that they would have a combined power rating of 6,600MW, cover an area of 7,250km2 (or 26.5 Taipei Cities) and cost almost NT$9 trillion. Even if a Tsai administration decided to make solar cell purchases compulsory for every rooftop in all of Taiwan’s cities, that would only take up at most 3,422km2 (the real figure is probably a third of this), and only 27.3TW hours a year.
In his article, Dang went so far as to claim that not only would 25 percent of total electricity production be an appropriate target for renewable investment to aim for, but that Taiwanese should even be aiming for 100 percent by 2050. With numbers this bad, who could even trust Dang with the till at a local 7-Eleven?
MICHAEL FAGAN
Tainan
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS