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ChinaTalk
Taiwan's War on Renewables [Fully Produced Radio Show!]
01:15:13
The Political Economy of Energy Poverty
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- [00:00]
Lily Ottinger
Imagine yourself on the streets of Taipei. It's August 2028. Aunties are pulling their wheeled grocery carts through the vegetable markets and commuters on motorcycles weave through traffic under the brutal sun. But something is missing. The AC isn't humming and the lights are off. Eight days earlier, Chinese warships encircled the island, attempting to strangle Taiwan's economy without firing a single shot. 97% of Taiwan's energy comes from imported sources, the highest rate of any major economy. The island runs on liquefied natural gas shipped through sea lanes that China's navy, the world's largest, can cut at will. Taiwan holds roughly 11 days of LNG reserves. Coal lasts about 42. After those are used up, the lights go out.
- [00:45]
Akiv Zakaria
This isn't a hypothetical war game right now. The war in Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz and damaged Qatar's largest LNG complex. Asian spot prices for natural gas have surged over 140%. And Taiwan, which gets roughly a third of its LNG from Qatar, is paying the price.
- [01:04]
Angelica Ng
I think Taiwan should send a thank you note and a fruit basket to Beijing right now because the reason why we are not having an energy crisis right now is because of China. We're supposed to get 35% of our LNG from Qatar. So we've just been buying it on the spot market and we've been fine because we have money. But the fact that there's all these excess cargoes floating around is because of China, because there's been tremendous natural gas demand destruction in China. And it's because they have all these excess capacity in coal plants that they don't use. And in the crisis they just crank those coal plants on and that loosened up supply on the spot market.
- [01:51]
Akiv Zakaria
That was Angelika Un, an energy journalist in Taipei. She started off as a renewables reporter and is now one of the island's most prominent nuclear advocates.
- [02:00]
Lily Ottinger
Taiwan's politicians have known about their energy vulnerability for decades and instead of fixing it, they've been systematically dismantling every domestic energy source the island has. They killed nuclear, they sabotaged renewables, they doubled down on imported natural gas. But why did this happen? Welcome to chinatalk. I'm Lily Ottinger.
- [02:20]
Akiv Zakaria
And I'm Akiv Zakaria.
- [02:21]
Lily Ottinger
Today, with the help of industry insiders, energy journalists and policy experts, we're telling the story of Taiwan's war on renewable energy. How a country facing existential security threats somehow ended up with the world's most dysfunctional electricity market.
- [02:35]
Ricky Huang
There are so many different reasons behind this anti renewable sentiment. You know like in cross trade relations, we often say one China, multiple interpretations. I think this is the same thing, like one anti renewable sentiment, but so many different rationale and so many different objectives.
- [02:52]
Lily Ottinger
This story is a fantastic case study in the ugly side of industrial policy. And the west can learn a lot from Taiwan's renewable energy failures. And yet this is also a story about how to build progress in a democratic society, how to change public opinion on polarized issues. And I find myself cautiously optimistic about how this story will end. And if things don't improve, well, Taiwan's energy poverty might just be able to resurrect the electoral chances of the Kuomintang. Even though the public broadly dislikes their
- [03:21]
Akiv Zakaria
ties to China, we usually do this kind of open source investigative journalism on Substack. This show is an experiment in converting that type of content to a podcast format. So please let us know if you want more episodes like this. To understand why Taiwan is in this mess, you have to understand the party that wrote the policy. The dpp, the Democratic Progressive Party is Taiwan's ruling party. President Lai Ching te represents the DPP. His predecessor, Tsai Ing Wen was also DPP. The party was founded in 1986, the same year as the Chernobyl disaster, organized by dissidents against the authoritarian Kuomintang government that ran Taiwan during martial law from the very beginning, two causes were welded together in the DPP's DNA democracy and opposition to nuclear power.
- [04:09]
Yu Xuanye
Taiwan started its construction of nuclear power plants starting in 1971, which at that time it was also because of the energy crisis that we are concerned. So all of the four nuclear power plants, including the fourth one that's never got into operation. And also the Lanyu storage site, which not it's not a storage for spent fuel, but the low level nuclear waste. So all of them are the siding process was complete and the construction was complete during the martial law era. That means Taiwanese people never get to be consulted or they never have a say on whether they want nuclear power plant in their backyard or not.
- [04:54]
Akiv Zakaria
That was Yu Xuanye, an energy policy researcher formerly at dsat, the dpp.
- [05:00]
Yu Xuanye
They were formed from the broader anti authoritarian movement, or you can say democratic movement. So they have this very close relationship with all the civil society that was organizing these anti nuclear protests, which also have political implication up till today.
- [05:21]
Akiv Zakaria
The specific slogan non nuclear homeland in Mandarin actually came later. It emerged around the year 2000 after the DPP first took power under President Chen Cuibian and was written into Taiwan's Basic Environment act in 2002. When Tsai Ing Wen ran for president in 2012, she attached a specific deadline to 2025. By the time she enshrined a non nuclear homeland into the Electricity act in 2017, it had become the DPP's single most identifying piece of energy branding. When tsai won the 2016 presidential election, the DPP didn't just win the executive branch, they won a legislative majority for the first time in the party's history. That gave them the political room to pass one of the most ambitious energy reforms in Asia. The plan had two pillars. Pillar one, phase out all foreign nuclear plants by 2025 and replace them with renewable energy. Pillar two break up the state owned electricity monopoly. We'll come back to Pillar two in a bit and focus on Pillar one for now. The plan for Pillar one was to shut down every reactor on the island and replace them with wind, solar and battery storage. The targets were aggressive. By 2025, the energy mix was supposed to be 20% renewables, 30% coal and 50% liquefied natural gas. By 2030, the renewables share is supposed to rise to 30%. The whole framework is called the 235 plan. Nine years later, Plant 1 was decommissioned in 2018-2019. Plant 4, Longmen, the one that was never completed, was mothballed in 2014 under KMT President Ma Yingzhou. In response to public outcry after Fukushima, a 2021 referendum permanently put an end to construction. Plants 2 and 3 went offline on schedule. Taiwan officially achieved its non nuclear homeland goal when the last reactor at Ma Anshan went dark on May 17, 2025. But Taiwan did not meet its 20% renewables target to compensate, as of 2025, renewables only provide about 12% of Taiwan's electricity, with about 6% coming from solar and 4% coming from wind.
- [07:28]
Lily Ottinger
Before we go further, we need to look at the partisan structure that this debate lives inside. The governing DPP is pro renewables but historically anti nuclear because of its authoritarian connotations. The two opposition parties, the KMT and the tpp, are pro nuclear but increasingly anti renewables.
- [07:46]
Akiv Zakaria
Quick crash course on the opposition. The kmt. The Kuomintang is the party that fled mainland China in 1949 and ran Taiwan as a one party state until democratization. They're pro nuclear, broadly friendlier to Beijing, and they currently control the legislature in coalition with a third party, the tpp. The tpp, the Taiwan People's Party, is the newest party founded in 2019 by the former Taipei Mayor Ko Wenzh. Angelica Ng describes the typical TPP voter as someone temperamentally Republican but socially liberal, politically homeless and focused on bread and butter issues. They caucus with the KMT on most things, including nuclear energy.
- [08:25]
Lily Ottinger
So nuclear and renewables are on opposite teams and posited as mutually exclusive energy paths instead of complements. That means the pressure to combat climate change doesn't actually motivate cross partisan cooperation in Taiwan. The people we talked to broadly preferred an all of the above approach, but that constituency is by and large unrepresented in Taiwan's legislature.
- [08:46]
Yu Xuanye
The political polarization has been a huge problem in all aspects. Like in there's in the past there are rooms for the both sides to support each other's bill but it has been harder and harder over the years. I think probably similar to the US situation right now. So this polarization has resulted in the lack of cross party alliances or consensus. So especially on energy I think as it has a huge topic that people are aware of, like they have already built up this image that the major two party or the third smaller party, they have different stances and because this has been part of their branding they I think they don't find it attractive to work with the other side as they have already attacked the other side with this so much.
- [09:49]
Lily Ottinger
To me it seems that the pressure to pick a side on the nuclear versus renewables debate emerged as a result of President Tsai's initiative to bring nuclear power to zero percent and her explicit framing that wind and solar were suitable replacements. Angelica argued that the KMT wouldn't have made this mistake if the tables were turned.
- [10:07]
Angelica Ng
But KMT are not anti renewables. If they were in power, they'd be pushing ahead with those renewable projects a lot more. Probably they'll be a lot more successful because they just have more capacity. I hate to say it, I know it's a cliche, but the DPP are really more like the lawyers and the party of lawyers and activists. Like literally like when they formed they were like the dissidents, right, who are against the KMT one party rule. And the KMT is more the party of engineers because the KMT throughout the authoritarian period they were a one party technocracy. And so there's a tradition in the party of being good on the numbers of being obviously not. Not all the legislatures actually had engineers training but they had a respect for the tangible pragmatic aspects of the project.
- [11:08]
Lily Ottinger
But that hasn't stopped the KMT from criticizing renewable energy projects on proceduralist grounds. Perhaps the KMT's real complaints are about cost or corruption. But they have also amplified narratives that renewables are bad for local ecosystems and infringe on the rights of farmers. Both parties have resorted to sensationalist political stunts and smear campaigns.
- [11:27]
Angelica Ng
So they're not anti renewables, they're anti how they perceive the DPP is not doing the renewables projects in a way that is up to their standards. And I do admit they do get into demagoguery because they feel like, well, if you're going to smear our nuclear power plants, we're going to smear your solar panels, and that's not worthy of them. But I don't think that's behavior that can be solved by a simple, simple political deal.
- [12:02]
Lily Ottinger
Now Taiwan has a DPP president and a KMT TPP controlled legislature. This is only the second period of divided government in Taiwan's democratic history. The first period ran from 2000 to 2008, but there was far less partisan gridlock thanks to Wang Jinping of the kmt, a legendary dealmaker who served as president of the legislature. Notably, he facilitated a quid pro quo deal that restarted construction on the fourth nuclear power plant. Despite the DPP holding the presidency, there is no Wang Jinping today.
- [12:33]
Akiv Zakaria
A Taiwanese decision to phase out nuclear and ramp up renewables would be one thing if the island had time and policy slack. It doesn't. Only about 16% of Taiwan's electricity comes from domestic renewable or nuclear power. And TSMC alone consumes 8 to 10% of Taiwan's electricity. The rest, 84%, comes from burning coal, oil, and natural gas, almost all of which is shipped in by sea. To cut Taiwan's gas supply, China would only need to blockade three LNG terminals.
- [13:01]
Angelica Ng
In terms of the blockade scenario, yeah, sure, you can store natural gas. So the more natural gas you have in your grid, naturally, the more vulnerable you are both to a blockade scenario or to just, you know, stuff happens, right? Like they run stuff. So much can happen. In terms of the blockade, obviously the Iran, if the Iranians demonstrate it, it can be done. But for China, they wouldn't even need to shoot missiles into the Taiwan Strait or anything like that. They have the vessels, they have the means to say, oh, we have new renewable energy mandates. So any energy vessels coming into our territorial waters have to get this permit. And if you don't have a permit, then you're out of line. You know, they can. That's just one scenario. There's 101 ways they can disrupt the flow that doesn't even rise to the level of a Blockade, which is an act of war.
- [14:11]
Lily Ottinger
For more details we talked at Tsaiing Luke, who runs the Energy Resilience Group at dcet, a type A think tank.
- [14:18]
Tsai Ing Lu
Taiwan's natural gas reserve, the stockpile is normally caps around 11 days of consumption so and this is considered because our limited storage tanks and also consider technical characteristics of how difficult it is to actually storage that much lng Even if
- [14:39]
Lily Ottinger
we include strategic coal reserves, Tsai Ing estimated that Taiwan could only hold out for about 40 days under current conditions once coal reserves are exhausted. War gaming by CSIS found that Taiwan's total electricity production would fall to about 20% of pre blockade levels, at which point all manufacturing would cease. So the question is what would it take to push that 20% number higher?
- [15:00]
Akiv Zakaria
To decapitate offshore wind, the PLA navy would have to cut undersea electric cables deep within Taiwan's Air Defense Identification Zone. Bombing solar fields would require air superiority and even then it would be a war crime to bomb all the apartment buildings with solar panels installed on the roof. Renewables are by their nature distributed and distributed infrastructure is hard to kill.
- [15:22]
Lily Ottinger
Earlier I mentioned that the 2016 reform had two pillars. Pillar one was killing nuclear. Pillar two was breaking up Tie Power. Tie Power, the Taiwan Power Company is the state owned electricity monopoly. It was established under Japanese colonial rule in 1919 and nationalized by the Republic of China in 1946. Taipower is highly vertically integrated today it controls all fossil fuel and nuclear generation as well as 100% of transmission, distribution and retail. Every kilowatt hour of electricity consumed in Taiwan goes through Taipower and the only thing they don't own is renewables. The idea was straightforward and well separate the generation companies from the wires, force them to compete on price and create a market where renewable developers could sell freely to industrial customers. Nine years later, Pillar two is strangled in its cradle by the same party that birthed it.
- [16:16]
Akiv Zakaria
On May 9, 2025, Taiwan's Legislative Yuan formally rolled back the requirement to break up Tai Power. The legislation was sponsored by DPP lawmakers and passed with cross party support. Thai powers union cheered we still haven't
- [16:30]
Jason Fung
seen any sign that they've started this from outside. The whole Tie power structure is like a black box. We don't know where the losses occur or why the prices are being set this low.
- [16:43]
Lily Ottinger
That was Jason Fung, a veteran of Taiwan's offshore wind industry with years of experience dealing with Taiwan's grid. Jason Fung is not his real name and we've anonymized his voice with AI tools for his privacy. To understand why the rollback is so devastating, we have to look at Taiwan's system for pricing electricity. Taipower sets artificially low prices for the electricity it sells, which are approved by the Electricity Price Review Committee in the DPP controlled Executive Yuan. Then Taipower turns around and begs for government subsidies to make up the difference. Remember, renewable generation is the only thing Taipower doesn't own. All of the electricity Taipower generates comes from lng, coal and nuclear. So these bailouts are overwhelmingly subsidizing fossil fuels. By mid 2025, Taipower had accumulated 418 billion NTD in losses, which is about 13 billion USD. As LNG prices soared 150% in the wake of the Iran war, Taipower froze household electricity prices at 3.78 NTD per kilowatt hour. That's about $0.12 US.
- [17:45]
Jason Fung
The reason the government wants the electricity price to be kept so is monetary policy. Because electricity price is one of the important factors in CPI. If they control the CPI to keep it below 2%, then they don't have the pressure to increase interest rates.
- [18:03]
Lily Ottinger
It would be political suicide to suddenly charge consumers the actual price of the energy they use. Which is why none of the three parties wants to liberalize Taiwan's energy market. Meanwhile, the artificially low fossil fuel prices ensure the renewable energy can't compete.
- [18:18]
Jason Fung
Now we see renewable energy prices like 4.5 to 5 new Taiwan dollars per kilowatt hour. Compared to the conventional price averaging 3 new Taiwan dollars. The renewable is much more expensive than the conventional electricity. If there's no such push or encouragement, normally people will not want to use renewables.
- [18:40]
Akiv Zakaria
Taiwan doesn't just subsidize fossil fuels over renewables. It subsidizes them unevenly. When Taipower raises prices, they discriminate by industry.
- [18:49]
Jason Fung
They categorize industries in Taiwan saying we have this high margin industry. Could be semiconductors, could be AI data centers. These are the ones that make more money. They will be directly impacted by this price increase. But then they also categorize another group of industries that are lower margin, make little money, and they say, okay, you can enjoy a delay of that electricity price increase. That really discourages these industries from finding innovative approaches to manage their energy costs. That further slows the whole economic development of the country.
- [19:23]
Lily Ottinger
The offshore wind industry is perhaps the most tragic victim of this electricity pricing scheme. Taiwan has some of the best offshore wind sites in the world. As the Taiwan Strait is essentially a 200 mile long wind tunnel. International developers lined up to build there and then it turned into a Boondoggle.
- [19:41]
Angelica Ng
Offshore wind was Tsai Ing Wen's baby. And while she was in office, it got every good little bit, and every time it got seriously in trouble, then magically somebody would come and help it out. This is no longer the case under Lai Chingde, and everything stalled. So the problem with renewable energy in Taiwan, the original sin is over promising. Because when you overpromise, like President Tsai did when she started the renewables rollout in 2016, you create all these conditions to meet these milestones that are very, very aggressive. And so you put money into it. And when the amount of money is excessive to the amount of pipeline and bandwidth, corruption is just the inevitable product of that scenario.
- [20:54]
Akiv Zakaria
Taiwan's offshore wind program runs in three phases. Round one was small subsidized demo projects. Round two, allocated in 2018, offered a 20 year feed in tariff. A feed in tariff is a guaranteed price the government pays renewable developers per kilowatt hour, locked in for the lifetime of the contract. It's a standard mechanism for bootstrapping a renewable industry. The big one is round three, 15 gigawatts targeted for 2026 through 2035. But rounds 3.1 and 3.2 came with notorious local content requirements. To win the auction, developers had to promise to build wind turbine components in Taiwan. The more localization they committed to, the more points they got in the bidding. The problem is that Taiwan doesn't have a wind turbine supply chain.
- [21:39]
Angelica Ng
I think sometimes when you create political consent for a project, you need to apply to different constituencies. So when she got started, in addition to the very ambitious targets, she also promised, oh, this will be a new industry for Taiwan. We're going to make these turbines at home. So that's why even though the electricity might seem more expensive, it's worth it for the economy. But the problem was it wasn't worth it for the economy because there's a lot of wind turbine components. They're very specialized. And the way you push the price down is by having scale. And if you only had the Taiwan market, there isn't a lot of scale. So Made in Taiwan components ended up costing sometimes 2, 3 times the components made outside of Taiwan dragged the whole profitability picture down. I'm very, very disappointed because at one point, I was a huge fan of President Tsai Ing Wen. She was such a cool girl, boss president, and she got so much like international goodwill, and she was very good at that part of her job. But her energy plan was just such a disaster. And to tell you the truth, that's when I started doubting the dpp. I used to be quite pro dpp, and I used to be quite pro the idea that Taiwan should stand up to China and retain our, at least de facto independence and our way of life. But I'm just like, you guys aren't taking this seriously. You guys are doing political theater. Because if you're not taking energy security seriously, how am I going to trust you that you're taking national defense seriously? And if I don't trust you to actually have the ability to protect Taiwan, then I'm going to have to take a fundamentally different approach to how to keep my home safe.
- [23:50]
Akiv Zakaria
Then the government announced that round 3.3 would drop localization requirements entirely. Prompted by an EU challenge at the World Trade Organization filed in July 2024, Taiwan settled the case in November 2024, agreeing to phase out the rules.
- [24:04]
Jason Fung
If now it's just a draft. If this final version is so attractive than 3.1 and 3.2, then those who got awarded in those two rounds, it's like asking them to abandon those green fields they acquired and then move toward 3.3.
- [24:19]
Lily Ottinger
When I was interviewing Jason, this part of the story made me a little crazy. The government has said, sorry, guys, turns out these localization requirements are impossible to fulfill. We've just now realized that. So the government's going to continue to hold some of these offshore wind projects accountable to satisfy an impossible requirement that the government. The government admits is not possible to satisfy. And. And the alternative is that they. They just abandoned this land or this. This zone, which is like a limited resource around Taiwan. Why.
- [24:48]
Tsai Ing Lu
Why do you.
- [24:48]
Lily Ottinger
Why can't the government solve this problem?
- [24:50]
Jason Fung
Because not everyone failed to realize the commitment some of them still can't. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners is the one still proceeding and making a lot of progress on the development in 3.1 and 3.2.
- [25:05]
Lily Ottinger
You say a lot of progress. Like, are the. Are the wind. Are the turbines spinning? Like, are they generating power?
- [25:10]
Jason Fung
Not yet.
- [25:12]
Akiv Zakaria
The localization requirements hit developers hard. The German utility rwe announced in November 2023 that it was pulling out of Taiwan. Jarrah, the Japanese giant, sold its stake in Formosa 3 to Koryo and TotalEnergies in 2023. The flagship Yunlin project, a 640 megawatt wind farm, finally reached full operation in early 2025 after years of construction delays and cost overruns, and saw its 70 billion new Taiwan dollar financing deal, originally signed in 2019 with 19 banks, fall into emergency restructuring. Sponsors had to put in roughly three times their original equity commitments and the
- [25:51]
Angelica Ng
freedom tariff stock starts high, but then there's supposed to be this learning curve. And cost for projects is supposed to go down aggressively until it's very cheap. The problem is cost didn't go down in Taiwan. Costs went up. Costs went up because the localization requirements were phased in. So that increased the cost. But also, in the aftermath of the Ukraine crisis, commodities went crazy, interest rates went crazy. Offshore wind farms, they got used to, they got reliant. Their whole business case was predicated on a zero interest rate environment. And then you have copper going up. I mean, wind projects were dropping life flies all over the world. They were dropping life flies in the United States. And Europe had a little bit better resilience. It's the home of offshore wind. But it's not just Taiwan that got hit, but Taiwan got hit really hard because it also had those stupid localization requirements. So you lose those localization requirements, now you have a real problem because now you have a group of people who's really mad at you because there are people who invested a lot of money into their factories making renewables components, and they were counting on localization to stick around not forever, but for a while so that they can at least recoup their costs. So it's a really sticky situation.
- [27:31]
Lily Ottinger
And perhaps this goes without saying, but Taiwan blocks Chinese players from participating in their offshore wind industry. That could have been a boon for European and Japanese developers that have struggled to compete with Chinese overcapacity. Instead, the DPP government privileged made in Taiwan components over parts made by democratic partners. And these projects have been phenomenally expensive. As a result, by late 2024, Taiwan had installed just 2.8 gigawatts of offshore wind, far below its original 5.7 gigawatt target. But there is still hope for Taiwan to get back on track.
- [28:02]
Tsai Ing Lu
So, technically speaking, t Taiwan has only failed to reach the first milestone, which is expected to postpone to this November. So I would say it's on a bumpy road, but not a dead end, as its percentage in the power duration mix has already increased over three times in the past decade, from 4.2% in 2015 to 12.7%. And then at that time. Actually, the total power duration last year was projected at 2,257.5 billion kilowatt hours. However, the actual rate was actually 288.9 billion kilowatt hours last year. So there is an increase of 31.4 billion kilowatts over the regional estimates, equivalent to the annual operator of actually 4.5 new gas power units, which is really big. So this demonstrates that it is not actually a failure of energy technology, but a challenge of rapid economic growth outpassing infrastructure policy is this.
- [29:01]
Lily Ottinger
Just cope though. We'll put a pin in this and come back to it. Solar energy has its own problems, and they're mostly about land. Taiwan is only about the size of Maryland, and mountains blanketed by dense jungle dominate much of the main island. As you might expect, solar projects have been bogged down by land use disputes and permitting nightmares.
- [29:21]
Yu Xuanye
So on the solar farm, the the solution they come up with are building solar farmland on fish farms. But actually that has also caused a lot of problem. For example, like when they start to do this farmland project tryout, a lot of people just turn farmland into the solar farm because that's more lucrative. So that actually impact the farmland and that will threaten our food security as well. So the Ministry of Agriculture stopped that.
- [29:56]
Akiv Zakaria
Solar developers responded by splitting large projects into smaller ones to dodge regulations. The most notorious case is liyang Energy. In April 2024, Taiwanese prosecutors indicted 15 people, including Li Yang, group chairman, the Energy Bureau's solar group director, and the former director of Tainan's Economic Development Bureau, for using forged documents to circumvent a 2020 ban on converting small farmland plots to solar. The estimated illegal profits ran to 9.1 billion new Taiwan dollars, close to US$300 million. And that's just one company, state owned Taiwan Salt Green Energy had its own scandal, with the former chairman fleeing abroad and surrendering to prosecutors weeks later, after a scheme to inflate engineering costs, Local township mayors in Yunli and Tanghua have been indicted for per kilowatt kickbacks. The result is a public that now associates renewables with sketchy land deals.
- [30:50]
Lily Ottinger
Our next case study in Kafkaesque dysfunction is the battery market. Battery storage is the technology that's supposed to make renewables work, Store solar during the day, release it at night, and smooth out the intermittency problem. Taiwan has actually built a meaningful battery fleet. The problem is that the fleet was built for the wrong market.
- [31:09]
Jason Fung
In other countries, they can store energy when the price is low and then release it into the grid again when the price is high. But in Taiwan, Taipower is the only one that can sell conventional electricity. When the battery energy storage system cannot prove that all the energy they store is from renewables, they are not allowed to do power trading in Taiwan.
- [31:31]
Lily Ottinger
Let me make sure you understand what he's saying. In most countries, battery operators buy cheap power when demand is low. Store it and sell it when demand is high. That's called energy arbitrage, and it's how grid scale batteries make money. But in Taiwan, up until the 2025amendment that rolled back the TIE power unbundling, only TIE power was allowed to sell fossil fuel generated electricity. Batteries store power from the grid, which is a mix of renewable, nuclear and fossil fuel power. Since they couldn't demonstrate that the electricity they stored came purely from renewables, they were locked out of the merchant arbitrage market by Taipower's monopoly. What they could do is sell narrower products, frequency, regulation, ancillary services, plus a newer reserve capacity market. And that's exactly where the fleet has been built. The problem is that those markets are small and fixed. When too many battery operators piled in, the auction price collapsed.
- [32:22]
Jason Fung
When the supply exceeds the demand, the auction price will drop to zero. All the batteries in Taiwan now suffer from this zero price thing.
- [32:32]
Lily Ottinger
The 2025 reform, the same one that killed the Taipower unbundling, did create a permitting regime that would allow battery farms to store electricity and sell it to Taipower for demand response. But that's not the same thing as legalizing arbitrage. Taiwan doesn't have a deregulated spot market where prices swing widely from hour to hour. In fact, Taipower charges the same price for electricity consumed at peak times versus in the middle of the night for 98% of households, which makes arbitrage a non starter. Industrial users are only charged 6 to 7 NTD more per kilowatt hour at peak times, which makes it very difficult for battery farms to turn a profit. Without batteries, replacing non intermittent natural gas with renewables is impossible, which leaves Taiwan structurally dependent on imports and guarantees that Taipower can continue to collect their handouts from the taxpayer. So Taiwan's energy market is still tightly controlled. Tsai Ing Lu has a different view on whether Taipower's monopoly is actually the binding constraint.
- [33:29]
Tsai Ing Lu
I do feel like unbundling TPC is not a prerequisite to solving our current dilemma because the primary hurdles, as I mentioned, is about limited landmass, administrative bottlenecks and green infrastructure. All these three will exist regardless of TPC corporate structure, right? So. And furthermore, I think territory renewable market is already largely driven by independent power producers, ipps. And the real solutions lies in market reform. I think rather than just corporate restructuring.
- [33:58]
Angelica Ng
The problem is in order to have unbundled type power so that there's like one entity to do the generation, one entity to do the transmission and one for the marketing, the sales, you need to have a pretty hands off approach to your energy policy. And after the Ukraine war there was a lot of intervention to push power prices down. And that of course put Thai power's financials in a terrible state and they had to be bailed out by the taxpayer. When you have that level of intervention, you don't, you know, you're not ready for a power market. You're not ready for price liberalization. Because the whole idea of price liberalization is let the market decide, let scarcity be your guide.
- [34:58]
Lily Ottinger
The battery economics that do work in Taiwan are behind the meter, meaning batteries situated near large industrial customers like semiconductor fabs used to optimize their own electricity bills against time of use rates. In March, the Ministry of Economic affairs announced a subsidy of up to 5 million NTD per megawatt hour for industrial users installing behind the meter storage. That's a strong signal that policymakers see the gap in the front of meter market and have chosen to subsidize private bill management rather than build the merchant market that would let batteries engage in arbitrage. Naturally, Chinese made batteries aren't eligible for the subsidy.
- [35:33]
Akiv Zakaria
Now you might be wondering why doesn't the government just subsidize renewables more to level the playing field with fossil fuels? Well, they used to. The government offered generous feed in tariffs that jumpstarted Taiwan's solar and wind industries in the late 2010s. But then the scandal started. We talked with Ricky Huang, the founder of Climate Era Catalyst for more details.
- [35:55]
Ricky Huang
So you oftentimes see a solar project in southern Taiwan, how certain government officials high up invested in a project and bribe a certain, bribe local residents or you know, like work with even gangsters or whatever to, to fast track the project, etc. You know, just so many ghost stories like this and I don't think these are, these are like, you know, baseless. I do feel like these stories are to a certain extent true, but I think many of them have been wildly exaggerated and I feel like there are a lot more alleged cases than there actually are. Of course I don't have the actual numbers and even you know, like this is definitely a real problem, like corruption is not a made up thing. But I think there's a recent study on corruption in the renewals in the renewable space. Oftentimes it is not necessarily, it is not necessarily the, you know, the high up officials that engage in these, you know, corruption or bribery practices. Oftentimes it's the mid level, you know, like bureaucrat that no one knows about that kind of is the mastermind behind all of this, right? So because they are relatively unseen by the public, because they are not really, you know, exposed to all this scrutiny, able to engage in these, you know, corruptive activities.
- [37:51]
Lily Ottinger
Taiwan's permitting process for renewable projects is highly unstandardized across localities and often totally opaque. This created an opening for what the local press calls green energy cockroaches Lunang Zhang Lang, which are corrupt local officials and gangsters who demand bribes from developers in exchange for permits and protection from protests.
- [38:11]
Akiv Zakaria
Here's one example. In 2020, Poseidon Solar Energy announced plans to build a fishing solar coexistence project in Kohu Township and Yuenling county on Taiwan's west coast. As soon as the news broke, the former township mayor Lin Celin reached out through intermediaries. The the original ask was an 8 million new Taiwan dollar bribe negotiated down to 4 million new Taiwan dollars, about 125,000 US dollars in exchange for expediting permits and eliminating public protests. Poseidon paid the bribe in three installments. The permit sailed through in two weeks. The deal eventually came to light and Lean was sentenced to 10 years for bribery and the project abandoned. When reporters visited four years later, they found a deserted wasteland with piles of waste earth. The phone numbers on the construction sign were all disconnected and the corruption goes higher than local mayors. In late August 2025, Cheng Yilin was detained by Taipei prosecutors. He was basically the government's point person for the entire offshore wind industry under Tsai Ing Wen. And he was extraordinarily young for the role. The Taiwanese press called him Little Ying Boy for his closeness to President Tsai. Ricky referred to him as Tsai's renewable whisperer. Chung was indicted on December 26, 2025 on bribery, money laundering and unexplained assets charges. Prosecutors say he took 1.98 million new Taiwan dollars in bribes from a construction company called Tongui in exchange for pressuring Taipower's then vice president. He was allegedly pressuring Taipower to fast track electricity feeder capacity for a development project in Taipei's Neihu District. Taiwan's tech and data center Heartland prosecutors flagged an additional 6 million NTD in unexplained assets. The money was allegedly laundered through relatives. Prosecutors are seeking 14 years. Ricky's view when we talked about the Chung arrest and a broader wave of indictments was that there's an intra party purge happening inside the DPP and that the renewable industry is collateral damage.
- [40:14]
Lily Ottinger
President Lai has declared war on the green cockroaches. But critics note that he's mainly targeting officials associated with his predecessor, Tsai Ing Wen, not reforming the permitting system that created the opportunity for corruption in the first place. Ricky told me that Lai cares a lot about gratitude and vendetta and yuan, and that anyone who stepped in his way years ago is a target now that he's in power. There were tensions between Tsai and Lai going back to the 2019 DPP primary when Lai challenged Tsai's renomination, the renewable industry. Tsai's baby became a target as Lai sought to distance himself from Tsai.
- [40:49]
Ricky Huang
So again, this is definitely real, but I feel like in recent years it's been weaponized by certain interest groups to. For various purposes, right? Like there are people who approach this from a rather nimbyism perspective. There's like, I don't want solar panels around my house, or I don't want wind farms around me, or I don't want geothermal or whatever. So I don't want it. There are also people who want to, you know, like, who want to criticize renewables in order to uplift, for example, nuclear or even to, you know, like uplift gas. If you look at a lot of these arguments, they appear to be just, you know, like anti renewables in general. But if you actually, if you actually push back and kind of engage with these people in a deeper conversation, oftentimes they are only focused on one aspect of, you know, renewables potential pitfalls. For example, maybe it is the procedural part that is creating a lot of these corruption rumors or whether maybe it's the technological part, you know, like it being variable and not baseload. But ultimately they're not fundamentally pro or anti a energy source. They're just, you know, like, they just care about the procedures or they care about, you know, the, the, the underlying economics, et cetera, et cetera.
- [42:30]
Lily Ottinger
There's another thing that makes the corruption the permitting process itself. Saul Griffith, the Australian electrification evangelist, describes how installing household solar panels works in his country. You go online, enter your address, and within roughly 10 minutes you get quotes from five contractors. Once you've selected a vendor, the permit to build can be issued in as little as 24 hours. Securing the electricity company's permission to connect to the grid takes just an hour. In Queensland, though, full interconnection takes a bit longer. In theory, the whole process could be done in a week, but in practice, two to six weeks is more realistic.
- [43:05]
Ricky Huang
In California, my impression that it's approximately six months and a lot more expensive because of the, you know, various red Tape and bureaucracies. In Taiwan, if you want to do rooftop solar, it is well over a year and it is on average a year or maybe even over a year. So it is even worse in California, even though California is known for, you know, its bureaucracies and red tape, et cetera. So you have so many different hurdles to overcome and that does not even include the potential environmental impact assessments that you have to do. And if you are talking about, you know, like wind or geothermal, you might even need to, you know, like have consultation sessions with the local residents. You need to do additional, you know, like noise impact assessment, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, that is creating a lot of friction for these developers. And I feel like what is making this worse is that the more anti renewable sentiment sentiments there are in the public, the less willing the government is. You know, like fast tracking or streamlining a lot of these processes. So to be honest, I don't think these government officials actually spent three months, you know, like researching and understanding the interconnection impacts of these projects. I think they almost need to wait for a few months because they are scared of the repercussions of approving this too quickly. Right. So this is really an optics and perception issue.
- [44:59]
Akiv Zakaria
For all the dysfunction we've been describing, Taiwan has made some real progress on solar.
- [45:05]
Ricky Huang
So if you look at the density of solar, the density of rooftop solar on plain lands, if you compare Taiwan to the world, Taiwan is number one in the world in terms of the density of solar, rooftop solar on plain lands. Which means that, you know, even though, you know, solar accounts for less than 10% of, you know, Taiwan's electricity mix, you know, its density is quite high compared to even California or Australia, these traditionally solar rich countries. Yeah, so we have, you know, that is also to say we have exploited much of the potential that is there. That does not mean that we don't have a lot more potential, but that means that, you know, most of the low hanging fruits have already been exhausted.
- [45:56]
Lily Ottinger
That sounded too good to be true. So we asked Ricky for his source. It turns out that he was slightly misremembering. He texted me a source link from the Taiwan Climate Action Network along with the following correction. Taiwan has higher rooftop solar density than any country. We typically associate with high solar capacity, but it's actually number two globally after the Netherlands. This makes sense. Taiwan has very little land, so the denominator in this statistic is smaller.
- [46:22]
Akiv Zakaria
We also talked to a bunch of people who are very pro DPP and particularly pro renewables, um, and what they often say is like, look, we've actually done a very phenomenal job adding, you know, energy to the grid in terms of green energy or wind or whatever. And maybe the problem is more so, not just how quickly supply is increasing, but how quickly demand is increasing and such that it's like a very difficult problem to solve. Go off. I want to hear your.
- [46:53]
Angelica Ng
Listen, the grid is so tight in Taiwan right now, you can't even build a 5 megawatt data center in North Taiwan. You know, by Modern Standard, a 5 megawatt data center is like a data center for ants. Okay? It is so small, 5 megawatts, you know, because they're building hundreds of megawatts in, in Japan and in China and the US they're talking about gigawatt scale, gigawatt scale data centers. So the fact that you can't even site a 5 megawatt data center in North Taiwan, which is the industrial heartland, is pathetic. And then I heard about 80 megawatt data center in southern Taiwan. They're like, yeah, that's finally a decent project. Then I was like, wait, they're telling me it's an 80 megawatt data center, but because of the power shortage, it has to be broken up into four phases and the phases might be built in different townships. That's not. That is, that is four 20 megawatt data centers in a trench coat trying to be a megawatt data center. So yeah, and the thing is, Google, Amazon, all these tech giants, they would love to build infinite data centers in Taiwan if they could. Of course they would. It's ideal for so many ways. It's central, but they are constrained by electricity. Our chip sector is constrained by electricity. TSMC alone takes up 10% of the grid. So yeah, it's like people get. Well, at least we're not blacking out. It's not good when you're leaving money on the table. Taiwan can't just be TSMC Island. You know, not everybody works at tsmc. We're already creating a tremendous imbalance because, you know, if you're not in tsmc, there's less going on in the economy and it's really incumbent on the government to try and find other sources. And AI would be perfect. And Lightning Bill is always going on about AI and how that's the future. But without data centers, that's not going to happen. There's been no blackouts, but I would say we're energy starved. We're like somebody who could be growing more, but there's not enough Protein in the diet.
- [49:24]
Akiv Zakaria
And then, on March 22, 2026, President Lai Ching Te dropped a bombshell. Lai publicly announced that two decommissioned nuclear plants, plant number two Guosong and plant number three Matan Son, meet conditions to restart. Lai cited rising electricity demand from AI development and decarbonization goals. He stipulated three nuclear safety assurance, waste management solutions, and public consensus. Taipower is submitting restart proposals to the Nuclear safety commission, and Ma Ansan could restart by the end of 2028. The press reported the news with headlines like A return to the nuclear homeland and throwing away the ancestral tablet of non nuclearism. This was a stunning reversal. The DPP had spent 40 years making opposition to nuclear a defining cause and non nuclear homeland the signature energy policy for decades. Tsai Ing Wen built her legacy on shutting down every reactor. And now, less than a year after the last one went dark, her successor was bringing them back.
- [50:28]
Angelica Ng
Fundamentally, I don't think President Lie is anti nuclear power. There's plenty of evidence just from what he said, to believe that he's actually pro nuclear power. And he's only been dragging his feet on nuclear because there's people within his own party that's holding him back.
- [50:47]
Lily Ottinger
But does restarting two reactors actually solve Taiwan's energy crisis? Our sources disagree about the magnitude. Restarting the two nuclear power plants will cover about 10% of Taiwan's current electricity needs, which is useful but not transformative. Angelica pointed out that the 6% from one reactor is already more electricity than every solar panel on the island combined. And if Taiwan completed the never opened fourth plant, nuclear's contribution could reach 16 to 18%.
- [51:15]
Akiv Zakaria
About the fourth reactor, the Longmon plant has the strangest story of the four. Construction started in the late 1990s. Plants 1, 2 and 3 were already running. Longman was supposed to be the next generation reactor, an advanced boiling water reactor designed by ge, with Hitachi and Toshiba building the actual reactor units, turbines from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and construction from Shimizu. But construction dragged on for 15 years. Anti nuclear protests organized harder against Longmon than the others. And the project was never completed.
- [51:49]
Angelica Ng
And the problem, unfortunately, again is political because Lohman, you saw 1, 2 and 3, they were built relatively unproblematically. But lo men had a lot of problems getting built because by that time, people already have been anti nuclear for a long time. And they were doing stuff like organizing the residents against it. And the construction was stop start because they kept, you know, saying, oh, there's an earthquake risk under there. And so it's all like Nonsense. But they, they realized at some point that it was easier to smear the project than it is to smear nuclear energy. Right. Because if you want to smear nuclear energy, you have to explain why the other reactors are running great and have no problems. But if you want to say there's something specifically bad about the Longland Project, that's a lot harder for advocates to refute. So they change tax to smearing the project as a uniquely bad and dangerous project with bad, I believe President Tsai Ing Wen called it a dangerous Franken reactor. So just because they had parts that come from like different suppliers, but that's every single nuclear power plant.
- [53:28]
Akiv Zakaria
The smear campaigns and politicization of nuclear power have led to political stunts from both major parties.
- [53:35]
Lily Ottinger
Do you want to recall the story of Crystal Yang and the irradiated water?
- [53:38]
Angelica Ng
Oh my goodness, that is so good. That is like peak Taiwanese democracy. If you needed a reason to defend Taiwanese democracy, this is it. So he had some DPP schmo anti nuclear politician who decided to do a stunt. So he went and got a pallet of just mineral water and he put stickers on like irregular water. And he took the water to, to Lanyu, which is like a far outlying island where they have some low level nuclear waste. We're talking about hardly radioactive, we're talking about shoe covers and rags that's been inside a nuclear power plant, even medical waste because people forget we have radioactivity at your dentist do to do your X rays and stuff. You know they also have some medical waste there. So he actually went on site, he plopped the water on one of the facility overnight and came back and got it the next day. And he went to the KMT headquarters to try and do a stunt and he had a news crew with him and he had that water and he was like, you know, Crystal Yang came down, she's a spokeswoman and he was pushing the water in her face and like this is irradiate. Did water in Lan from Lanyue. Do you. And she just like before he even finished, she just grabbed, she knew what he was doing. She just grabbed the bottle out of his hand and just chugged it in his face. And he was like stunned. He couldn't, he was stuttering, he couldn't say anything. He was just like really mad. And then he ran off and he left all his water behind. And the beautiful thing is he had a news crew with him. So they captured it all. And later on that night Crystal and a bunch of KMT politicians just had A live stream. And they were all drinking the water on air and educating the public about nuclear energy.
- [55:49]
Lily Ottinger
So what does Taiwan actually need? The answer, according to everyone we spoke with, is not nuclear or renewables, it's both. Fundamentally, this is a political economy problem, not a technological one. I asked about a quid pro quo. Could the DPP give the KMT TPP a budget for restarting nuclear, an approved nuclear waste site, or money for small modular reactors in exchange for renewable energy reforms? Ricky told me that he hadn't thought about that idea but was skeptical that it could work in such a polarized environment. And by reversing the nuclear shutdown unilaterally, Lai has paradoxically removed his own leverage. The opposition now knows that he actually likes nuclear. So pro nuclear carrots aren't enough of a concession to sell the deal to anti renewable constituencies.
- [56:35]
Ricky Huang
I am personally pretty nuclear agnostic. I feel like, you know, like if you do nuclear then sure, like that is going to take off burden from, you know, land usage for renewables. But nuclear also has a lot of its own challenges. You know, nuclear is probably the most polarized issue in Taiwan ever, you know, you know, apart from cross strait relations. So again, I am theoretically nuclear agnostic, but I feel like nuclear might not be that much easier and faster compared to other resources. Yeah. So of course we should, we should take a, all the above approach. We should consider their potential. But I don't feel like, you know, by doubling down on nuclear we can be more complacent on deploying renewables or you know, doing more micro grids.
- [57:29]
Lily Ottinger
Ricky presented another interesting idea during our interview, something he's calling Pax Electricana.
- [57:35]
Ricky Huang
So we already import most of our iron ore from Australia. Is there a chance where Australia can not only supply us with the raw materials but rather pro, you know, like take a step further and process that into iron and then ship the iron to Taiwan so that Taiwan can process it into steel. So you know, there are two steps in steel making. There's the iron making step and the steel making step. The iron making step actually accounts for 85% of the energy consumption of the entire process.
- [58:13]
Yu Xuanye
So.
- [58:14]
Ricky Huang
So Australia is desperately trying to look for new export opportunities in order to replace its conventional fossil fuel exports. Taiwan is desperately trying to find new solutions to meet its load growth. And I feel like if you can somehow, you know, marry this demand and supply and this is not only a Taiwan Australia story, you know, there, there are countries like Japan and South Korea who have very, very similar characteristics and there are countries like Canada Chile, Mexico, who are very similar to Australia. Even California is reaching 20 to $30 per megawatt hours with with its excess oil. So I think these are the opportunities where we can use trade and commerce and geopolitics to reshape, you know, supply chains and, you know, global economy using clean energy and electrification as the core element.
- [59:14]
Lily Ottinger
I'm quite skeptical of this idea. There are some pretty obvious costs to offshoring heavy industry when your country is facing invasion threats. But the fact that he thinks this would be easier than building reactor 4 and maximizing wind and solar build out is telling.
- [59:28]
Akiv Zakaria
There's another idea that Yu Xuan kept coming back to in our interview, controlling demand.
- [59:33]
Yu Xuanye
Because Taiwan, we are not operating under a deregulated market in terms of our electricity. So there's no clear government intervention as well, and also no market intervention as well to curb this demand growth. And every time there's an expansion need from the especially the chip manufacturing industry, but also other industry. When they cry for more energy, the government's first response is to come up with more. But they really don't have this way to use any, for example, efficiency measure or any other pricing mechanism to effectively curb this growth.
- [60:21]
Lily Ottinger
Perhaps it's a bad sign that she thinks reducing demand would be more politically feasible than expanding supply. But considering that Thai power artificially keeps electricity prices dirt cheap, maybe there really are some low hanging efficiency increases being left on the table.
- [60:35]
Akiv Zakaria
So let's stack the reforms our sources have called for. First, standardize the permitting process across localities. Second, restore real incentives for renewable deployment. Feed in tariffs, tax credits, or removing the artificial price advantage that subsidized fossil fuels enjoy. Third, liberalize the trading platform, at least enough that batteries can do arbitrage and independent generators can sell freely even if TIE power remains integrated. Fourth, restart nuclear as a baseload complement, not a competitor to renewables, and start a conversation about finishing reactor four. Fifth, build out a real demand side policy with higher prices for peak time consumption.
- [61:19]
Lily Ottinger
I asked some of our guests about the role of international audiences in Taiwan's fight for energy independence. After all, the European Union successfully challenged Taiwan's offshore wind localization requirements at the World Trade Organization. But I was wondering how else democratic governments could help push things in the right direction. Or perhaps, you know, collaborate over geothermal sites since there's a lot of, you know, crossover with the skills learned from fracking.
- [61:45]
Ricky Huang
I feel like Taiwan is feeling tremendous pressure from the US in procuring LNG or even oil. I do feel like, you know, some of the ideas that you mentioned using fracking technology and apply it to geothermal. This is what companies like Ferval is doing. I feel like Taiwan can definitely benefit from that. But it is unclear how bullish the US Government is going to be in working with Taiwan on developing those technologies. So I feel like the primary priority of the US government or the current administration is to sell Taiwan more LNG or more oil and maybe those other technologies would come, you know, like in tandem with, with lng. But that is not the priority, I feel like. Yeah, so I think, you know, this, this is not only just a US pressuring Taiwan kind of story. I feel like this is also a Taiwan wanting to remain relevant to the
- [63:04]
Lily Ottinger
US for context, in February 2026, Taiwan signed a reciprocal trade agreement with the Trump administration, committing to over $40 billion in U.S. lNG and crude oil purchases through 2029, which will increase U.S. lNG imports to roughly one third of Taiwan's total supply. Between this and the lack of optimism about a nuclear for renewables quid pro quo, I got the sense that Taiwan's climate advocates have met a lot of dead ends over the years. Of course, political activism is about maximizing impact within the confines of what is possible, but Taiwan is a young democracy and the playbook of possibilities is still being written. Given how much is at stake, I can't help but wonder whether there is room for some Wang Jinping style needle threading or creative international partnerships. Let me know in the comments if you think I'm being too idealistic.
- [63:53]
Angelica Ng
Taiwan is overly sensitive to the foreign press. So I think when I was a nuclear advocate, it was very, very helpful for me to say, hey, nuclear is cool everywhere. Look, you know, they're, they're doing more nuclear in Europe. But fundamentally this is a, this is a, this is a Taiwan issue, a local issue. People should be aware of what's going on. And if I could say one thing that international audiences can do that will help us out a lot is get rid of the very facile view of KMT vs DPP as one side is for the protection of Taiwan and the one side are evil trolls who want to sell out Taiwan. Look a little bit deeper. One side is talking the talk, but they're not walking the walk. And that results in a lot of resentment within Taiwan. And I think that it's probably going to lead to a epic electoral backlash both in this year's local elections and probably, although it's two years away, 2028, you just. There's a level of sick and tired with a DPP in Taiwan. That's got nothing to do with cross strait relations. It's got to do with their incompetence. A lot of anger, a lot of rage. And so it's going to shift and then people are going to have this very simplistic idea, like if it shifts to, let's say, a KMT getting voted in a dramatic result, people might say, oh yeah, the Taiwanese, they're pro China now. They don't care about democracy. And that would be the wrong picture. It's like there's something about Taiwanese energy that's not working. It is an international geopolitical risk. Taiwan is very fragile and people here are really sick and tired of it.
- [65:59]
Akiv Zakaria
Taiwan once aspired to be a clean energy leader, but the DPP's botched green revolution has left the island structurally addicted to imported fossil fuels.
- [66:09]
Lily Ottinger
President Lai showed courage by admitting that no nuclear homeland was a fantasy instead of doubling down to save face. And there are other signs of progress, like the unwinding of legal restrictions on batteries and offshore wind localization rules, but there's a lot more work to be done.
- [66:23]
Angelica Ng
I wouldn't say intractable. I think there are structural problems there. I think every step of the way, to the extent the DPP government have done, done the right thing, it's because we were at the edge of the precipice. There doesn't seem to be a. There doesn't seem to be any respect for experts or any risk. Any kind of like, you don't have to touch the stove, guys. Like, I, I just feel like that's my big frustration with dpp. They really are like, if they can solve the problem with spin, they don't want to solve the problem with action.
- [67:07]
Lily Ottinger
Energy poverty is a choice and Taiwan is in for some difficult conversations about how to move forward. While researching this story, it gave me hope to see how many smart, engaged young people there are fighting for Taiwan's energy independence. But as the saying goes, hope is not a strategy. This episode was produced by Lily Ottinger and Akib Zakaria. Special thanks to Jason Fung, Angelica Ng, Ricky Huang Tsai Ing Lu and Yu Xuanyi for their time and expertise. If you want to learn more, check out Angelica's ongoing work on her two substacks, Typology and Elemental Energy. You can also check out Ricky's podcasts where he hosts cross partisan debates about energy policy. Those are linked in the show notes. One final note on Jason's voice. Journalists used to anonymize voices by shifting their pitch. But AI Tools can undo that quite easily. Instead of trying to alter the original recordings, we used 11 labs to reproduce Jason's quotes in an entirely different voice. We still pitched down the AI generated audio, but that was just for theatrical effect.
- [68:09]
Akiv Zakaria
Chinatalk is an audience supported publication. If you'd like to help us produce more content like this, please consider a paid subscription to our substack.
- [68:24]
Narrator/Poet
The AC stopped humming on August day eight aunties in the market no fan on their face 11 days of gas, 42 of coal then the island goes dark and the story gets old.
- [69:02]
Lily Ottinger
Knew this would come but we looked
- [69:07]
Narrator/Poet
away 40 years they said said. 40 years of dreaming we could wish it all away but the straight is a wind tunnel and the sun still shines While we burn the future for change deeper times why call he. The Franken reactor sleeps beneath the hill Crystal Young drank the water but the people got it him why only I. Not nuclear or green we need both to survive. Round 3.1 round 3.2 localization chains our way went home indeed Elio felt the pain Inland turbines turning three times the cost While the Louis chew date what we lost behind the meter batteries away zero price auction we sealed auction own FI powers black box CPA's lie TSMC pays more so the auntie don't cry but the data centers can grow AI wall we are argue if nuclear is S. The Franken reactor sleeps beneath the hill Crystal Young drank the water
- [72:11]
Jason Fung
but
- [72:11]
Narrator/Poet
the people got ill boy call the only I guess a queen. Not nuclear or green we need both to survive. Lighting just said the words nobody wanted to hear for he only needs power not slogans, not pride not 40 years of fear. Is coming the hor is close spot market got five. With nuclear beside them Open both your eyes My God.