Things I Felt Quite Different during My Return Trip to Taiwan
Studying renewable energy in Germany has changed my views on the current trends and debates on this small island…
Read it in other languages: Deutsch/中文
What’s so unique about studying renewable energy abroad?
This is the very question I have been asking myself from the very first day I came to Germany.
Half a year has passed by, and after a two-week trip to Taiwan, I took the same flight and same train back to the now more familiar city of Freiburg.
At first the two-week trip was simply a return visit. I do not intend to go back to the island anymore in the foreseeable future (I will be having my internship and my master thesis in the coming semester breaks), so this is more like a farewell trip with my old friends.
I thought it would be very familiar to me; for the past year, I have been saying goodbye just too often.
During the past half a year, something has changed, but many remained the same. The island is still highly bipolarized in many topics including energy transition policies, while most of my friends are in the same position when I first left six months ago.
But when I began to talk with them, I felt something quite different.
Research versus Deployment: A Gap still too Wide in Taiwan
Before studying in Germany, I had already learnt many innovative paradigms and technologies that were roaming outside the island. Still, never had I felt so distant to my engineering and academic friends once I was back.
Two short stories should portray my feelings accurately.
The first was my visit to a friend in a geothermal project team. Before I headed back to Taiwan, I was informed that they wished to develop a double-fed induction generator (DFIG) that fitted their own turbine. Since I am quite interested in optimizing the integration of renewables onto the grid, this might actually be the ideal internship opportunity.
When I met the team members of the project, however, I was disappointed to hear that they lacked the financial and instrumental support to develop this kind of generator. They had to work on their own because they could not find anyone in Taiwan that was capable to design a suitable DFIG for their turbine.
There are just not enough wind capacity installed in Taiwan to make this kind of device a common standard for renewable sources. In contrast, most wind turbines in Europe have already installed a DFIG 10 years ago. This is undoubtedly the main reason why conventional utilities in Taiwan can still claim that renewables are a threat to reactive power stability (which is what I was taught in the undergraduate courses).
The second example was when I visit another friend who is working for a small solar company that focuses on citizen projects. We were comrades in many campaigns for a long time, so the conversation was more sensational than the previous one.
His complaint on the lack of grid integration capacity for local solar installations was of most significant. Although there already exists a plan to boost solar capacity to 20 GW by 2025, the only grid operator in Taiwan still does not have a detailed analysis on how much distribution lines we would need to be added throughout the next few years.
“We would always ask if a specific location is capable of installing our panels. They sometimes confirm to us that it is, only to later find out that there is no transmission line nearby. And they don’t have to pay any financial or political responsibility for this kind of careless attitude.”
Then we discussed the integration issue on a more systematic level. He is the kind of friend who has been learning quite a lot from outside the island (sometimes via my posts here on Medium), so I was quite surprised to learn that he believed that more (not less) inflexible conventional power plants (traditionally termed “baseload”) would be needed when more solar capacity is online.
“Solar will increase the gap between minimum and maximum conventional power demand. Doesn’t this mean that we need more baseload in the future?”
This is actually not a very difficult question to answer (especially if you have read my posts before). The problem is that in Taiwan, even a solar advocate poses such question. With that in mind, you get a picture of how easy it is to be an energy transition skeptic or a conventional power advocate in Taiwan.
To make the record straight, I do not think that academic and research capacity in Taiwan is inferior to that in Germany. In fact, from my experience it should be the other way around.
While we were teaching undergraduate 101 classes in the first semester of our program, my friends in Taiwan were already learning research skills and beginning finding materials for their master thesis.
A Taiwanese friend asked me about the details of how business as usual (BAU) scenarios were set. She will develop a BAU scenario for the building sector in Taiwan in the next few months.
Another Taiwanese friend who I mentioned in a previous article has bridged two professors who did not know each other before, one specialized in sustainable building and the other microclimatology, to finalize his master thesis on energy efficiency policies on campus buildings.
The engineers in Taiwan are also well aware of the state-of-art technologies in related fields. The team members of the geothermal project told me I should pay some attention on the development of power converters with GaN, a new kind of power device that is still ongoing intense research.
I think the real issue here is the lack of connection between research and deployment. This is a systematic problem.
The regulations and amount of renewables installation are not yet mature for things like DFIG to become common standard. In addition, we are not seeing the utilities and grid operators taking renewables seriously enough, just like how my friend in the solar company has complained.
We lag those advanced nations in energy transition some ten years of experience in integrating renewables. As a result, we are currently discussing our energy policies as if there were no renewables in the future.
Shenao and Failure of NPP #2: A Wake-up Call Still Not Being Heard by the Majority
Coincidentally, two major events related to energy transition in Taiwan occurred during my stay on the island.
The first was an approval of the environmental impact variation assessment of the Shenao coal power plant, which I have illustrated a lot in my last post.
The second was a failure to restart the highly controversial reactor inside nuclear power plant №2; it was emergently stopped 24 hours after connected back to the grid for the first time in some 680 days.
Many Taiwanese failed to connect these two incidents together. Were we to have our aged nuclear power plants online beyond 2025, the kind of failure NPP 2 faced would become a regular routine.
Nuclear has never been used as a main flexible source to respond to the residual load variations. While many nuclear advocates (outside Taiwan) claim that the technology is potentially flexible enough to integrate with renewables, I (among many other Taiwanese) simply lack the confidence that Taipower would ever dare to operate its nuclear fleet like that.
Meanwhile, coal might have more chance to act more flexibly than the current status. But at what costs? Does it really worth the costs? How low will Taipower and other utilities allow the capacity factor of their coal power fleet to decrease? Will they be willing to regularly ramp down and pull their coal power plants offline? How long do they think that coal can remain competitive to renewables plus storage?
All we are hearing among the experts from conventional utilities is still something like the following:
“Nuclear and coal are the cheapest sources of electricity, and contribute to the necessary baseload for the power system. Since the people of Taiwan decided to phase out nuclear, we have no other alternative but to embrace coal.”
Ironically, it is the environmental groups (whom those utilities have long despised) who have begun to stress a potential Systemkonflikt and the need to embrace more flexibility for the power system.
Since the debate on Shenao, some of them have asked for the details of my term paper on the residual load in Taiwan by summer 2025. So I suppose there is still hope… when you neglect those energy transition skeptics trolling around the commentary section.
These were the debates which shaped the current energy policies of Germany and many other nations at least ten years ago. The paradigm that provided the right condition was necessary for a systematic change like the one that is still ongoing in Germany, and again we Taiwanese are ten years behind on this topic.
Grassroot Climate Action: Well Developed, Much Hope
A friend once told me that the divestment movement is something Taiwanese students might only be aware of no less than ten years later.
Luckily, the civil sector is the most flexible sector to absorb new ideas. Emphasis on flexibility of power systems is just one example.
My successors in the environmental branch of the student government of Taida has surprised me when they informed me that a campus rally would take place before Earth’s Day, calling for divestment from Formosa Plastic. It is the very company who not only pollutes central Taiwan but also Vietnam, and increases our domestic carbon intensity and reliance on fossil fuel.
Another organization I helped a lot during undergraduate years was the climate action club. It is also developing much better than the days I was fully participating, in particular their intimate cooperation with Taiwan Youth Climate Coalition on an analysis of Taiwan’s intended national determined contribution (INDC).
I was also surprised at the intense amount of capacity building both of them are currently taking up. I have always been loose on these matters, so I worried a lot about the sustainability of all those networks I once built and organized after I left Taida. In reality, they have operated even better under the new leaderships, which I felt quite honored to know.
Meanwhile, climate action groups outside campus are also moving on to the next stage. Members of 350 Taiwan has told me that besides their current cooperations with other organizations to stop Shenao, they are planning to release a roadmap of how Taiwan can achieve 100% renewables by 2050. It would be very great to see renowned international teams such as the Solutions project helping them in the future.
In parallel, grassroot climate actions are also on the climax in Germany. Freiburg divested from fossil fuel during my return trip. We are now hoping a global Catholic divestment before Earth’s day.
Taiwanese are very Interested in the Narratives of Germany, Perhaps too Much
The final difference I felt was how my experience in Germany, though just six-month-long, has caused so much interest to others I have met.
Many of my younger friends want to study abroad, and some are also interested in renewable energy. When they searched for master programs abroad, they paid more attention on the program I am currently studying, since, you know, the senior never makes a mistake, right?
Again, to make the record straight, I must point out that our program is far from ideal. I understand the effort our professors have made to integrate subjects on a multi-discipline level, but studying from physics to accounting in just one semester is like running through the undergraduate courses eight times faster, or, as one of my classmate depicted, “eating so full and then throwing everything up”.
This is part of the reason that I felt a little lost during the first semester, especially when I learnt most of my friends in Taiwan were already choosing the topics of their master thesis with their professors (we don’t even have our assigned professors yet!).
I heard that from the second semester the course materials will become much lighter. I hope this is true. But I think people will still be disappointed by the teaching quality of the course, especially those who want to learn deeper in a specific subject in class.
REM is not something like that. You probably have to self-teach yourself about the topics you are really interested in if you want to have the same degree of knowledge with people graduate from schools that are more competitive in nature (such as the technical universities of Karlsruhe, Aachen, and Munich).
The University of Freiburg also features another international program Sustainable Systems Engineering, which I suppose has much more courses to choose from then our own program. Maybe they provide better quality of lectures. But, who knows?
The other thing I observed a lot during my visit in Taiwan was how enthusiastic people were about the “sustainable way” Germany has chosen. A graduate class and a reporter from Taiwan will be paying visit to Freiburg this week, and they all asked me about further information of the “greenness” of the city.
As I have mentioned in an earlier post, there are many parts of the German lifestyle that is without doubt far more sustainable than that in my home country, such that things we were promoting back in Taiwan seemed trivial to talk about in Germany.
“There are almost no problems with plastic straws and use-and-throw tableware. 50% of the meal the Mensa (student’s cafeteria) provides is vegetarian. Many people refuse to use time (and electricity)-consuming smartphones…”
But when looking at energy policies, Germany is a battleground between the progressives and the reactionaries. We are not seeing a diesel ban, and the coal industry is far from dead.
Most importantly, Germany’s story toward Energiewende is just a chapter of how the entire European continent moves towards 100% renewables. As an isolated island that seeks independence (in politics and in energy supply), I believe the experiences in Ireland, Scotland, or Hawaii will give Taiwan more valuable insight.
My Future Plans after the Trip
That said, there are definitely many lessons we can learn from the past and the present of Germany’s Energiewende, along with many other European nations.
Knowing that, an environmental organization has offered me a special column to write about the current trends and development of energy transition in Europe. I intend to confront all the existing myths that are still haunting my home island with this column, and I hope we begin the discussion of a genuine energy transition afterwards.
So this was my return trip. Though disappointed by some status quo and lost a chance to develop a DFIG, in the end I did find an ideal opportunity. Writing a special column implies that I can travel around the continent with my own schedule. But most importantly, I have never felt so crystal clear about what I am really meant in the bigger picture.
It is good to sometimes go back to the past and refuel yourself for the future.
