Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) last month said that the nation should jointly operate offshore renewable energy plants in the Philippines and send the power to Taiwan using subsea cables.
At first, Kuo’s suggestion was lambasted by lawmakers as unhelpful and “empty rhetoric.” After the fracas died down, the minister in an interview said that his suggestion was not some pie-in-the-sky idea, adding that he did not have time to elaborate and was not at liberty to speak freely.
On June 29, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “The New Era of Clean Energy: Transcontinental Power Lines.” The article’s subheading was “British homes would be powered with African energy under an ambitious plan,” with the main point being western Morocco’s potential as an abundant source of green energy.
Xlinks, an energy infrastructure company belonging to British energy entrepreneur Simon Morrish, has built several solar arrays and wind farms in the North African kingdom, which are set to provide 8 percent of the UK’s energy needs.
The subsea cable would be the longest in the world, stretching up to 4,000km in total.
Another project is by Meridiam, a Paris-based infrastructure investment company, which is installing a nearly 1,200km-long subsea cable from Greece to Israel, with a midway station in Cyprus.
The last remaining EU member state not plugged in to Europe’s interconnected electricity grid is Cyprus. However, once the construction of a subsea cable from the Greek island of Crete to Cyprus that began last year is completed, every EU member would be connected, wrote Melisa Cavcic in Offshore Energy Magazine, a journal focusing on trends and developments in the offshore energy-generation industry, in an article published on Sept. 23.
This integration would not only aid Cyprus in its energy transition, but could also spur Greece to become a clean energy transition corridor.
Developers said that this energy alliance would bring Cyprus’ energy isolation to an end, and accelerate the European and Mediterranean region’s energy transition.
Several months ago, the US International Development Finance Corp told Greece’s Independent Power Transmission Operator that it was interested in investing in the project.
It is common to see an interconnected, cross-border electrical grid in Europe. Taking just the UK as an example, BritNed connects the UK with the Netherlands, Nemo Link connects the UK with Belgium and the North Sea Link connecting the UK with Norway.
Viking Link, which connects the UK with Denmark — passing through German and Dutch maritime exclusive economic zones before reaching Cambois in northern England — is the UK’s sixth undersea cabler and spans 765km.
Viking Link is the world’s longest continuous undersea power cable.
Like Taiwan, the UK is an island nation, and its 2016 energy net imports comprised 5 percent of the country’s energy consumption. Between September last year and August, this grew to 10.1 percent, showing that international energy imports are to continue to rise, especially with the transition to green energy.
Ninety-five percent of Singapore’s electricity comes from natural gas. However, with limited national territory — just 2.6 times the size of Taipei City — it would be challenging for the resource-strapped city-state to develop renewable energy on its own.
In 2021, then-Singaporean minister of economics and labor and current-Deputy Prime Minister Gam Kim-yong (顏金勇) announced that the city had budgeted for the import of 4GW of low-carbon energy through 2035. This would account for about 30 percent of its domestic electricity demand.
To reach this goal, Singapore launched the Lao PDR-Thailand-Malaysia-Singapore Power Integration Project, a plan that is considered to be a forerunner to an ASEAN power grid.
In June 2022, Singapore began importing 100MW of hydroelectric power from Laos.
Last year, it granted conditional approval for plans to build undersea power cables from Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam to import renewable energy.
Singapore is also set to ink the Australia-Asia Power Link project agreement with Australia. This plan would supercharge the construction of the world’s largest renewable energy base in Australia’s Northern Territory, set to provide 6GW of electricity year-round.
Starting in 2030, 4GW of the budgeted electricity would be provided to Darwin, Australia, from 800km away in the arid town of Elliot through the SunCable Project.
Afterward, 2GW of electricity would pass from the Gunn Point Peninsula outside of Darwin through 4,300km of undersea cables to Singapore. The start time is slated for the early 2030s, and is estimated to provide 1.75GW of stable power supply.
Kuo’s point is that long-distance power provision has already redrawn the map of global green energy. It crosses not just national borders, but within nations too. What Kuo has seen is the opportunity that transnational undersea cables could bring to Taiwan.
Such a proposal is likely to give rise to a chorus of criticism that a more than 300km undersea cable between Taiwan and the Philippines would be easy prey to sabotage, especially from a certain nearby adversarial country.
However, such criticisms are no more than cookie-cutter, or marketing fuel to the long-burning, sooty and ashen fire of ideology that Taiwan somehow cannot survive without nuclear power.
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Lin Shang-jung is employed in the manufacturing industry.
Translated by Tim Smith
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