Dozens of Changhua residents and activists yesterday rallied in front of the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) in Taipei to protest a proposed coal-fired power plant, with no end to the 11-year-long battle over the project in sight.
The rally was timed to coincide with the EPA hosting the 15th environmental review of the project.
Taiwan Power Co’s (Taipower) proposal to build a two-generator plant on a 152 hectare property in the Changhua Coastal Industrial Park in Lugang Township (鹿港) was first submitted for an environmental assessment review in 2004. Between 2004 and 2007, the first round of reviews were held and the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) committee concluded that the project should be rejected.
However, before the EPA could formally adopt the committee’s decision, Taipower withdrew its submission to prevent a wholesale rejection.
The company resubmitted the project in 2008, almost unchanged from its original submission, and the project underwent another round of reviews up to August 2010, after which little was heard from Taipower about the proposal.
However, last month the company sent a collection of documents to the EPA to reopen the review process.
Changhua Environmental Protection Union director Tsai Chia-yang (蔡嘉揚) said that Taipower, in its 2004 proposal, said that Taiwan would face power shortages by 2011 without the Changhua plant, but the nation has survived so far without it, suggesting the company’s claims are inaccurate exaggerations.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tien Chiu-chin (田秋堇) said the project should have been rejected years ago, but has somehow survived 15 environmental reviews.
“The plan [submitted today] is still based on data collected 10 years ago. The project is an insult to the intelligence of Taiwanese and an abuse of the EIA review system,” Tien said.
Attorney and environmental activist Thomas Chan (詹順貴), who was a member of the EIA committee that reviewed the project until 2007, said he resigned from the committee because the EPA allowed Taipower to withdraw the project before it could be formally rejected, thereby opening a loophole in the EIA system to enable unqualified projects to exit and re-enter the system.
“According to the Environmental Impact Assessment Act (環境影響評估法), no project can be resubmitted if it contains elements that have been rejected by an EIA committee. The latest Changhua plant proposal is apparently the same as the earlier versions, but the EPA has ignored this obvious fact and started another review. What is collusion, if this is not?” Chan said.
The EIA committee yesterday decided to return the project to the Ministry of Economic Affairs because it was resubmitted for more than a seven-year period and does not fit into the current environment.
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