More than 500 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) are likely to be sold through a Taiwan Renewable Energy Certification Center program through the end of this year, driven by intense corporate demand for green energy, the Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspections (BSMI) said yesterday.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs’ bureau administers the Taiwan Renewable Energy Certificate (T-REC) program.
Each certificate represents 1,000kWh of electricity from renewable sources.
The first deals were announced in May, with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) being the biggest buyer, the bureau said in a news release.
Speaking to the Taipei Times by telephone, BSMI division director Huang Chih-wen (黃志文) said that pent-up corporate demand for green energy explains the program’s quick adoption.
“A lot of the deals were in the works long before we opened the T-REC platform,” Huang said. “As soon as they saw that the first batch of transactions went smoothly, everybody jumped in.”
While the first batch involved mostly solar power, most of the upcoming deals will be from onshore wind projects, Huang said.
“We anticipate reaching 500 million kilowatt hours by the end of the year,” Huang said, adding that the exact schedule is uncertain because parties take their time before signing deals, which run for up to 20 years.
TSMC in May bought 38,259 certificates of the 38,318 available, the center’s Web site showed.
TSMC in July signed the Climate Group’s global RE100 pledge, promising to be “committed to 100 percent renewable electricity” by 2050.
Also in July, the firm inked the world’s largest corporate power purchase agreement with Danish energy giant Orsted A/S, buying all of the energy generated from Orsted’s 920 megawatt wind farm off Changhua County for its 20 year lifespan.
The bureau’s role includes working with Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) to track green electricity generators connected to the Taipower grid and electricity from the grid that goes to a green energy buyer.
Taipower charges NT$0.058 per kilowatt hour to “wheel” energy from renewable sources through its grid from supplier to producer.
An amendment last year to the Renewable Energy Development Act (再生能源發展條例) provided the legislative structure for T-REC, Huang said.
“The independent power producers are protected,” Huang said. “They can leave Taipower to sell their electricity to corporate offtakers at a higher price, but they have the option to return to Taipower at any time at the same rate that they were getting before they left.”
In a small town in Paraguay, a showdown is brewing between traditional producers of yerba mate, a bitter herbal tea popular across South America, and miners of a shinier treasure: gold. A rush for the precious metal is pitting mate growers and indigenous groups against the expanding operations of small-scale miners who, until recently, were their neighbors, not nemeses. “They [the miners] have destroyed everything... The canals, springs, swamps,” said Vidal Britez, president of the Yerba Mate Producers’ Association of the town of Paso Yobai, about 210km east of capital Asuncion. “You can see the pollution from the dead fish.
SELL-OFF: Investors expect tariff-driven volatility as the local boarse reopens today, while analysts say government support and solid fundamentals would steady sentiment Local investors are bracing for a sharp market downturn today as the nation’s financial markets resume trading following a two-day closure for national holidays before the weekend, with sentiment rattled by US President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff announcement. Trump’s unveiling of new “reciprocal tariffs” on Wednesday triggered a sell-off in global markets, with the FTSE Taiwan Index Futures — a benchmark for Taiwanese equities traded in Singapore — tumbling 9.2 percent over the past two sessions. Meanwhile, the American depositary receipts (ADRs) of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the most heavily weighted stock on the TAIEX, plunged 13.8 percent in
A wave of stop-loss selling and panic selling hit Taiwan's stock market at its opening today, with the weighted index plunging 2,086 points — a drop of more than 9.7 percent — marking the largest intraday point and percentage loss on record. The index bottomed out at 19,212.02, while futures were locked limit-down, with more than 1,000 stocks hitting their daily drop limit. Three heavyweight stocks — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (Foxconn, 鴻海精密) and MediaTek (聯發科) — hit their limit-down prices as soon as the market opened, falling to NT$848 (US$25.54), NT$138.5 and NT$1,295 respectively. TSMC's
ASML Holding NV, the sole producer of the most advanced machines used in semiconductor manufacturing, said geopolitical tensions are harming innovation a day after US President Donald Trump levied massive tariffs that promise to disrupt trade flows across the entire world. “Our industry has been built basically on the ability of people to work together, to innovate together,” ASML chief executive officer Christophe Fouquet said in a recorded message at a Thursday industry event in the Netherlands. Export controls and increasing geopolitical tensions challenge that collaboration, he said, without specifically addressing the new US tariffs. Tech executives in the EU, which is
RSS