Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Taiwan: Renewable Energy Reserves

I saw this piece on how Scotland and Taiwan are working on a wave power system for the Beautiful Island and was reminded of Chen et al's Assessment of renewable energy reserves in Taiwan (2010)... the authors write:
According to the estimation of this paper, the reserve of wind energy, up to 29.9 kWh/d/p (i.e., kWh per day per person), is the largest one among seven kinds of renewable energies in Taiwan, followed by 24.27 kWh/d/p of solar energy, 4.55 kWh/d/p of biomass, 4.58 kWh/d/p of ocean energy, 0.67 kWh/d/p of geothermal energy and 16.79 kWh/d/p of hydropower. If regarding biomass as a primary energy, and assuming 40% being the average efficiency to convert primary energy into electricity, the total power of the seven kinds of renewable energy reserves is about 78.03 kWh/d/p, which is equal to 2.75 times of 28.35 kWh/d/p of national power generation in 2008. If the reserves of 54.93 kWh/d/p estimated from other four kinds of renewable energies that have not technically matured yet are also taken into account, it will result that the reserves of renewable energy in Taiwan can be quite abundant.
Our nuclear and coal plants could easily be shut down. The article breaks out each form of power and discusses potential locations. Quite informative.
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2 comments:

les said...

I just learned the Philippines now has E85 fuel on sale, which is a blend of 15% gasoline and 85% ethanol. The ethanol is produced from the abundance of sugarcane grown there, much of it on the island of Cebu. I wonder how feasible it would be for Taisuco to get in on that action...

Anonymous said...

Very informative, but I wouldn't call the switch easy. It'd be really expensive to make that kind of switch immediately for example. But having any new or replacement capacity built-out using renewables would be feasible, and even that would be at a high cost too.

There's really cheap low hanging fruit like eliminating remaining leaded gasoline and finally getting all 2 stroke and older scooters off the streets.