The long-stalled initiative to enact legislation promoting renewable energy is just one of the many problems standing in the way of turning Taiwan into a low-carbon country where the economy and the environment interact harmoniously, analysts said.
Following a threat earlier this month by German wind-power firm InfraVest GmbH — the only private producer of wind energy in Taiwan — to quit the country, debate surrounding a bill to develop alternative energy from renewable resources, blocked in the legislature for more than six years, was brought back into focus.
Recently, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) have restated the government’s position that the bill must clear the legislative floor before the end of this legislative session on May 31.
At present, eight versions of the bill have been initiated by the Executive Yuan, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers and the Democratic Progressive Party are awaiting second or third readings.
New Energy Association of Taiwan secretary-general Rosa Tsou (鄒智純) said she doubted the government was resolute enough to push the bill through, as it “involves complicated business interests involving different parties.”
The most contentious parts of the bill address the types of raw material that should be defined as renewable resources and how state-owned Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電), the country’s monopoly grid operator, should set the price of different forms of renewable energy, she said.
Tsou said there were slight differences in the versions of the bill.
“Each time the bill gets waylaid it is because of lawmakers who represent interest groups that are not satisfied with the definition of renewable energy or with the price of electricity from a specific renewable source,” Tsou said.
A senior legislative assistant who wished to remain anonymous said that had it not been for some lawmakers who were pressured by operators of incinerators, the bill would likely have cleared the legislature at the end of 2005.
The incinerator operators worried that the development of renewable energy would have a negative impact on the price of electricity generated at incineration cogeneration plants, he said.
When the bill was placed on the agenda for a second and third reading in the following session, he said, it was again delayed after a lawmaker sought to make a last-minute change to include electricity generated from rice husks.
Another lawmaker at that time had tried to add “run-of-river water plants,” which require that a dam cover the full width of a river and utilize all the water in the river — a practice that can damage the environment — to the bill, he said.
“When a compromise was finally made that small water plants, without a dam, could be regarded as sources of renewable energy, efforts to break the deadlock over how much Taipower should pay for the energy were in vain,” he said.
Reviewing the eight versions, Green Consumers’ Foundation chairman Jay Fang (方儉) said he doubted the bills would increase renewable energy use.
“The bills focus mainly on establishing a subsidy system to help renewable energy projects, while the objective should be to create an environment in which renewable energy operators would find it profitable to invest,” Fang said.
Fang said Taipower and the Ministry of Economic Affairs were the main obstacles to the development of renewable energy, saying that “the price-setting mechanism would not be fair if Taipower continued to conceal its cost structure.”
“Before InfraVest GmbH invested in the country, Taipower told the ministry that the cost of producing one unit of electricity from wind was between NT$7 and NT$8. Why, then, did Taipower offer InfraVest only NT$2 per unit?” he asked.
He said a mechanism should be created that would give households and companies a choice between using traditional and renewable sources of energy and allowing the electricity generated by renewable sources to be used locally rather than via the national grid.
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