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Taiwan’s state-owned Taiwan Power Company (Taipower) announced to build a solar power plant with capacity of 100MW, the largest-of-its-kind in Taiwan when being completed.
In 2008, Taipower applied to build a new thermal power plant in Changhua County in central Taiwan. However, the construction plan was finally turned down by Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Administration, Executive Yuan in 2016, due to environmental issues. To avoid land-holding as well as to prompt renewable energy with the sitting administrative, Taipower plans to build a 100MW solar power plant on the site.
The site for Changhua’s thermal power plant covers a land of approximately 152 hectares. A Taipower official explained that the site will be mostly used for building the 100MW solar power plant, which will become Taiwan’s largest one. 10 hectares from the site will be used for building booster stations for interconnecting offshore wind power projects, while another four hectares will be reserved for establishing a test center for CO2 capture and storage technology in the future.
Taipower plans to invest NT$6.25 billion in the 100MW solar power plant and expects to complete in 2022. The solar power plant is expected to generate 130,000,000kWh of clean electricity per year after beginning commercial operation.
On the other hand, Changhua County government plans to interconnect 2GW of wind power by 2020.
(Photo: Planned site for Changhua’s thermal power plant. Source: waders via Flickr shared by CC 2.0)