The ECCT's Wind Energy committee hosted a lunch with Lee Chun-Li, Deputy Director-General of the Energy Administration (EA), under the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA). In his presentation, Lee gave an update on recent wind energy developments and the prospects for the year ahead.

As of 27 November, Taiwan's offshore wind farms have collectively installed 374 turbines with a combined capacity of 3.04 gigawatts (GW), placing Taiwan seventh in the world in terms of offshore capacity. According to Lee, Taiwan is expected to overtake Belgium to reach sixth place in 2025. The biggest increase in capacity has been added in 2024 with the completion of three wind farms with a combined capacity of close to 1.8GW added.

Five additional wind farms with a combined capacity of 2.34GW are in the pipeline in the next round of development (Round 3.1), which the EA hopes will be completed between 2026 and 2028. For the subsequent round (3.2), the results of allocated capacity were announced on 5 August 2024. An additional five wind farm developers subsequently applied for contracts with the MOEA.

DDG Lee acknowledged that there are challenges to be overcome to realise the government’s ambitions, principally related to rising costs from increasing capital expenditure for wind farms, limited financing options, inflation and higher financing costs. The government aims to help to address these challenges by reviewing regulations, fees and other charges, getting state-owned banks and insurance companies to support project financing, establishing a government-owned green power retail company and to promote a Corporate Power Purchase Agreement (CPPA) mechanism with guarantee coverage of 60-80%.

Following negotiations at the WTO level, the government has committed to eliminating local content requirements (the so-called Industrial Relevance Program, IRP) for future rounds of development, starting with Round 3.3. For the ongoing Round 3.1, existing administrative contracts will be followed. For Round 3.2, the Industrial Development Administration has specified force majeure and unattributable incidents applicable to IRP while the MOEA will review the IRP applications submitted by developers using the same principles and handling them according to case-by-case reviews.

DDG listed what he called the three pillars for building a friendly investment environment for offshore wind energy: 1) Location (finding additional locations for fixed bottom turbines, which could include expanding the area of sites already identified for development, as well as identifying locations suitable for floating offshore wind (FOW) turbines); 2) Regulations (inserting flexibility into rules where possible) and 3) Financing (helped by the support of state-owned institutions).

Lee concluded that green energy is the core element of the energy transition in Taiwan and called for continued collaboration with European partners on advanced energy solutions to help Taiwan to reach it net zero goals, which includes targets for offshore wind energy of 5.6GW by 2026, 20.6GW by 2035 and 40-55GW by 2050.

In the Q&A session, Lee said that the schedule for Round 3.3 has not yet been decided. On a question about FOW, Lee noted that the main issues that need to be worked out remain costs, technology (which of the variety of solutions available are most suitable for Taiwan) and infrastructure (Taiwan’s existing harbours are already short of capacity for fixed bottom turbines. Specialised infrastructure will need to be built to cater to FOW, since the platforms need to be constructed onshore and then towed out to sea.)