Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) has enlisted independent power producers (IPPs) to help raise its reserve capacity to more than 6 percent, as the state-owned utility tries to avoid yet another round of blackouts across the nation.
There have already been two power outages over the past six days, with the first one causing five hours of rolling blackouts, amid record power consumption for the month of May.
“We do not usually see this kind of energy usage until July,” Taipower spokesman Chang Ting-shu (張廷舒) said.
Photo: CNA
Yesterday’s peak consumption was 37.57 gigawatts, breaking the all-time May record of 37.44 gigawatts set the day before.
To help Taipower improve its power supply status from “orange alert” (reserve capacity of less than 6 percent) to “yellow alert,” (reserve capacity between 6 and 10 percent), Taipower appealed to IPPs, or facilities that generate electricity using steam from a separate operation.
“We gave them a preferential price to coordinate their power production with us,” Chang said.
A typical IPP could be a petrochemical or textile factory that utilizes steam, a byproduct of manufacturing, to generate power.
While the power they supply might be small compared with overall power demand, they could make a difference between continuity of supply or a third blackout within a week, he said.
Taipower did not take this month’s early heat and Taiwan’s overall economic growth into account when estimating this summer’s power consumption, he said.
The utility estimated that peak summer power consumption would be 38.7 gigawatts, just 3.01 percent above yesterday’s peak.
“The economy has been much stronger than we expected. It is hard to predict what peak usage this summer is going to look like,” he said.
However, most of the power supply difficulty stems from large units currently undergoing maintenance or repair, he said, vowing that all of the utility’s major units would return to service by next month, bringing much-needed stability.
In a separate news release yesterday, the Bureau of Energy said that overall energy use in Taiwan jumped 7.4 percent year-on-year in the first quarter.
This reflects not just increase in electricity use, but gas for transportation and petrochemicals for industrial use, the bureau said.
Although this is a high number, it is not a historical anomaly, a bureau specialist said.
During the 1990s, when Taiwan experienced very high annual GDP growth, it triggered similarly high jumps in energy use, the specialist said.
“We are trying to decouple GDP growth from energy use,” the specialist said. “We hope that we can eventually moderate or even decrease energy use while our economy continues to grow.”
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