Taiwanese Elections from an Environmental Viewpoint
On Saturday Taiwan will vote for a new president and a new parliament.
Overall Summary of the Elections
China is still the dominant factor in the elections. Many progressive parties and voters have strategically endorsed the presidential candidate of the Democratic Progressive Party(DPP), forming an “united front against Chinese nationalism”.
Yet tensions exist between the allies because of topics related to environment, labor rights, etc. This resulted in the strong competition and fierce attacks between the political workers of DPP and other parties; due to the same pool of potential voters, their competition between each other might have been more intense than with the Chinese nationalist party and its allies.
The latest legally-allowed polls suggested that DPP led the presidential election. The situation in the parliament election is more uncertain.
Climate and Energy Policies
Most progressive parties endorse the overall idea of the energy transition, but call for long term climate and energy goals.
DPP keeps its energy transition goals to reach 20% renewables by 2025, and an additional 10 GW of offshore wind between 2025 to 2035. Other than that there exists no further official plans for renewable expansion. The greenhouse gas reduction goals adopted by the environmental protection agency in 2017 is still valid nominally, but it is by no means ambitious and there exists still no concrete road map to achieve it.
On the other side of the political spectrum, more vague promises are given. The Chinese nationalist candidate calls for a halt of the ongoing expansion of renewables until he considers them cheap enough to make economic sense. In his viewpoint that would be no earlier than 2025. However, he also promises that Taiwan could get 50% of low carbon electricity by 2035 (he intentionally dodges the question of how much renewables that would imply). As usual, his supporters don’t seem to bother with the paradox that he is planning to do less than the current government during his supposedly presidential term (2020–2024), while promising a similar mid term goal.
Although during the campaign, a large focus has been put on the remaining nuclear fleet and the unfinished NPP 4, the possibility of reviving the industry remains dim. The remaining two nuclear power plants are reaching their designed lifetime, and life extension would face large opposition from legal and safety viewpoints. NPP 4 has always been an engineer nightmare; Taipower estimated that it would take 7 years the least just to overcome the technical difficulties of completion, not to mention that new seismic faults have been found near the site recently. These older nuclear designs would also pose a threat to further renewable integration if they are to be kept on line.
