A spike in demand for electricity made it necessary to restart the third coal-fired generator at the Taichung Power Plant, Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) said yesterday as a feud with the Taichung City Government lingers.
Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) has sought to keep the generator from being used. In 2019, he revoked Taipower’s license to operate the generator.
However, the state-run utility has taken the city government to court over the license revocation and won the case in February last year, Taipower manager Chang Ting-shu (張廷抒) said.
Photo: Su Ching-feng, Taipei Times
“We would like to remind the Taichung City Government that operation of the third coal-fired generator is completely legal,” Chang said, adding that the municipality is being “unreasonable and obstructive.”
The plant has long been a sore spot for residents, who complain about pollution.
Taipower said an unexpected high rate of electricity use while plants elsewhere were undergoing maintenance made it inevitable that the generator would be brought back online.
“From January to last month, we used 3.3 percent more electricity than the same period last year,” Chang said. “Returning Taiwanese manufacturers, high demand for exports and increased domestic electricity use are all up.”
“We were taken by surprise,” he said.
The generator has been retrofitted to reduce pollution, Chang said.
“It used to emit 0.6g to 0.7g of particulate pollution per kilowatt-hour, but that has been reduced to 0.46g,” he said.
Taichung’s air quality problems would subside when liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants — due to come online this summer — start generating electricity, he said, adding that Taiwan would not face an electricity shortage this summer.
However, Taiwan’s water situation is exacerbating an electricity crisis, said Chen Jong-shun (陳中舜), an assistant research fellow at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (中華經濟研究院).
“Taiwan is highly reliant on hydroelectricity to adjust peak energy usage, and the serious water shortage has directly affected our ability to use hydroelectricity,” Chen said.
The problem would worsen, as energy use spikes in summer, with July and August bringing the greatest demand, he said.
Moreover, the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) in June is to reduce electricity generation.
The central government should keep the Guosheng and Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant in Pingtung County’s Ma-anshan (馬鞍山) running beyond their planned lifespans to save Taiwan from further power crunches, Chen said.
“It is absolutely doable on a technical level, as long as Taipei has the political resolve,” he added.
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to