Is Geothermal the Solution to Energy Crisis, China Threats?

Taiwan suffers from the energy crisis. With the island completing the gradual disposal of nuclear power plants – somewhat mainly of its power mix – the accumulation of the promised marine winds has been reduced. All the time, the industry has become more dependent on liquefied natural gas imports. But this source is not only dirty, but also leaves the island at the risk of siege and other forms of coercion by China. In 2024, the electricity rates in Taiwan increased twice a year after two years of increases, reaching record levels for industrial users. The high interest rate can come this year. The power outage has become more common.

Taiwanese leaders can find comfort if they make fun of heat under their feet. Taiwan is located between two tecton plates on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, and Taiwan is rich in earth thermal resources. Although they have gone so far, they have not been used, it may change soon. President Lay Cheng T expressed his strong support for planting the Earth’s thermal fingerprint in Taiwan to produce more clean energy and support the island network.

Last year, the Ministry of Economy in Taiwan published new guidelines to encourage ground thermal development. In April, Google announced a deal with the developers of the BASLUAD CAPITAL to create a small spectral power power enaperism to operate the current Taiwanese data centers. Companies have not yet announced the exact location of the factory, but the drilling has already started on the eastern coast in Taiwan. In a government support offer, senior Lai administration officials participated in April at the leading ground energy industry summit in Taiwan.

Alexander Helen, CEO of Basili Capital, said. “There is a great opportunity.”

Taiwan was between The oldest countries in Asia to develop the Earth’s Energy Energy. Al -Jazeera began investing extensively in the resource in the 1970s, and the first online thermal energy plant came in 1981. But the power plant in plants faced problems immediately as crystal deposits diminished in energy production – and in 1993, Taiwan abandoned and closed the project.

By that time, Taiwan – like nearby Japan and South Korea – accused its future on a different source of power: nuclear energy. All three places have limited lands and there are no real oil or gas reserves. The nuclear energy promised to generate abundant electricity regardless.

The nuclear industry in Taiwan was linked to politics. The Taiwanese government built nuclear power plants under the authoritarian rule of Komantang (KMT), the Chinese nationalists who announced martial law on the island in 1949 after the communist defeat on the mainland of China. Since Taiwan moved to democracy in the 1990s, KMT has been the pioneering conservative party on the island. While the party retracted its support, which it eventually regretted it, which the Taiwanese voters opposes on a large scale, it supports closer relations with China.

The main opponent of KMT is the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which was formed in 1986 as a scope of a pro -democracy movement after only months of nuclear collapse in Cernopyl in the Soviet Union. In addition to their differences about the future of Taiwan – the DPP in favor of maintaining the current situation on the island and sovereign challenges in Beijing – one of the most polarized issues between the two parties has always been nuclear power. For any member of DPP.

The anti -Nuclear weapons position of DPP has eased throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, as concerns about climate change increased. But the Fukushima Dychi disaster in March 2011 in Japan revived the party’s activist’s position. In 2014, DPP demonstrators pressed the then President Ying Geo, from KMT, to stop construction at the fourth nuclear power plant in Taiwan. After TSAI ing-Wen from DPP invaded victory in the 2016 presidential elections, the fate of the project was closed.

Under Tsai, DPP passed a law set a target to close the other three nuclear power plants in Taiwan. But as DPP falsified a more aggressive relationship with China, the island was more than ever dependent on the so -called silicon shield: the theory that the semiconductor industry in Taiwan is very important for the global economy that Beijing may consider twice the invasion. Taiwan represents approximately five capacity to manufacture international connectors and has more than 90 percent of the world’s ability to get rid of advanced fine chips.

Once the nuclear reactors in Taiwan began to put non -communication in 2018, electricity prices increased and the power outage increased. The final reactor was closed in May. The semiconductor manufacturer in Taiwan, giant behind the silicone shield, warned that it will now pay the highest electricity prices in the world at home.

In response, some anti -nuclear weapons factions in Taiwan have eased their approach. Lai suggested that it would be open to restart nuclear plants. In August, Taiwan voters will make voting cards in a KMT regulator referendum on whether the latest factory will be restarted to close. But when KMT is reserved in an increasing list of differences, the exceptional possibilities are unconfirmed.

KMT and DPP are much more in their aspirations for the Earth’s thermal power. The power source is behaves like nuclear energy in that it has a fixed output, and KMT satisfies. DPP loves to be renewable thermal energy and does not generate radioactive waste.

in the beginning From gradual disposal of nuclear weapons in 2016, DPP promised that marine wind turbines and solar panels would compensate for lost atomic energy. But the construction has proven to be more difficult than the leaders believe, and the nature -based nature means that replacing the consistent directing of the required reactors using more fossil fuels. Coal and gas made up approximately 80 percent of the electricity mixture in Taiwan as of last year, according to data from the public facilities.

So the leaders gave other Earth energy look. In 2021, a developer named Fabulous Power returned the original site of the first thermal thermal station in Taiwan from the eighties to sell energy to Taybur. Ricky Huang, defender of the Earth’s thermal technology in Taiwan and co -founder of the non -profit climate stimulus, said only one year for the developer to return the factory via the Internet, but it took four to obtain operating permits in order.

The bureaucracy was barely the only problem to embrace a new form of local energy. Government investigative studies of land thermal resources on the island showed that up to 90 percent of underground hot water tanks – the traditional source of ground thermal energy – are located on the land of the indigenous population.

The original inhabitants of the Australian Taiwan have bore the development of other energy on the island. In the eighties of the last century, the government secretly opened a low -level emptying site on Laniu Island, the tropical homeland of the Tau people, one of the 16 original Taiwan tribes.

Although the support of the nuclear warehouse today is mixed in Lanyu-it provides some of the best jobs in what is mostly a tourist economy-the original solar energy opposition is greater, because a large share of the plates ended on the land of the indigenous population.

“When the indigenous people see the solar panels, we believe that the government is here to take our land,” she said, adding: “The thermal energy is in the same position.”

During Heling, the Swedish executive authority, he refused to reveal the exact location of the capital of the capital, Basiloa, Taiwan, and said that it is located outside an original reserve – from the land where the tribes members could live with a degree of autonomy.

Mennation, who was previously working as a Taiwanese diplomat in New Zealand, believes that the country’s thermal energy industry could be a good model for Taiwan. Earth thermal energy generates more than one -fifth of electricity in New Zealand, and is the second largest energy exporter.

In New Zealand, there are many of the best thermal thermal resources on the land of Maori. But the industry reduced Maori to deals; The Maori’s Land Trust is the first large operator in New Zealand. The New Zealand Free Trade Agreement with Taiwan includes one of the only specific chapters in the world to determine the original cooperation.

More fair, deliberate offers With the original Taiwan groups, it is not the only solution to increase the thermal energy on the island. The total amount of energy that can be generated from benefiting from traditional thermal resources in or near the original lands is about 989 megawatts – less than 2 percent of the total electrical needs needs.

Currently, Taiwan uses less than 8 megawatts of possible Earth thermal energy. But the government set a target to multiply this to 20 megawatts by the end of the year. Huang, a geological lawyer, said the goal then Skyrockkets is fifty times to 1 GB – or 1000 MW – by 2027, with fixed growth to 6 GB by 2050. Reaching anything exceeds 1 GB using traditional thermal technology “literally impossible”.

This is good news for us startups such as Fervo Energy and Sage Geosystems, which raise the use of cracking techniques for drilling deeper to reach the Earth’s thermal heat. Traditional Earth thermal Energy companies get from the shallow tanks of underground water that are heated by magma on the planet. Circumcision technology will allow companies to deeply excavate heat from the depths of the molten planet.

The use of crackering tools for ground thermal energy can provide benefits for Taiwan: strengthening the island’s supply of clean, reliable and safe energy with the balance of its trade with the United States amid the Trump administration tariff war.

“When I think about the potential export markets for Earth’s Earth Energy, Taiwan is mainly located in the upper part of the list,” said Wilson Rex, a researcher at the University of Princeton who tracks the Earth’s Energy Technology. “I don’t think there is a place on the face of the earth where the need is higher for such.”

While Taiwan is currently focusing on building traditional ground heat resources, it may generate at least 32 times of strength using cracking techniques from the next generation, according to a recent study conducted by scientists at the Institute of Industrial Technology Research in Taiwan.

Last October, the CPC Taiwan Petroleum Company and the SINICA Academy Academy began digging an exploratory well on the northeastern coast of the island. However, in order for the industry to expand, Huang that Taiwan needs to do a more stringent geological survey to confirm the best drilling sites and make permits easier.

As a first step, Huang works with legislators to pass a draft law that would raise restrictions on ground thermal drilling in national gardens – which leads to more lands for developers outside the original reserves. The legislation will also simplify the rules for the declaration request.

The thermal energy may lose its luster as soon as the pits start. Craft technique can provoke earthquakes, which is a perennial problem in Taiwan. In 2017, seismic activity of the South Korean thermal energy project raised a harmful earthquake that restores the country’s thermal industry in the country.

Huang is not worried. He said: “We are very accustomed to earthquakes. There is a joke that if you are in a room when an earthquake occurs, and if you are very cold and sit there, you are likely to be Taiwan.”

Even if there was a tremor in Taiwan, Huang said that the power source has something about that the nuclear power did not: a wide political appeal. “The Earth’s thermal is one of the most powerful energy resources,” he said.