There's not a whole lot of space in Taiwan for huge solar farms. They were close to having nuclear, but there's strong political pushback. Offshore wind seems to be doing well, at least.
Solar doesn’t need that much space. Nuclear is about 10x as energy dense in the US, so it’s better but not as much as generally portrayed.
However unlike nuclear you can toss solar just about anywhere there’s a little land or even a lake. Nuclear needs lot contiguous space with access to water for cooling and big reservoirs for safety etc.
Not in the same instant but they were unavailable in overlapping succession such that the entire fleet was never close to completely online even when the grid was at maximum demand.
Of those 56 reactors in the entire of 2021 no more than 49 where on online at any time in the same day. 90% of the time it was 46 or less. 16% of days it was 36 or less bottoming out at 28, and everything didn’t suddenly start working in 2022.
France covered that by importing power from the rest of Europe. Taiwan doesn’t have that option as an island whose closest friendly neighbor is hundreds of kilometers away.
That’s probably more of an artefact of France building exact copies of the same design within a relatively short timeframe (ten years) so they all shared the exact same design flaws and started showing their age at the same time
Thus ‘ramping up’ is a problem. If they want to replace 5% of their electric grid per decade with nuclear then it’s not an issue but that’s not going to solve short term issues. Go a lot faster and they trade short term problems for longer term issues.
100KM² of panels (10GW) will generate 22,000 GWh, or roughly 10% of Taiwan's current electricity demand. That is, a 10KM * 10KM field (not necessarily all in on place) that takes up just 0.3% of the island is all you need.
Last year, TSMC used 25,000GWh, or 12.5% of Taiwan's electricity, so a 10GW solar project like stated above will take care of it.
If you need dollar figures: Chinese PV prices have dropped to 10 cents/watt while LFP cells are down to $53/kwh. So, $1b will get you 10GW worth of panels, while $4.4b will get you 8 hours of storage. So, roughly $10b to completely go off grid.
Something must be wrong in your estimates, the biggest solar farm is ~60sqkm and only 2.2gw, it's in India and definitely get much more sun than taiwan
Edit: nvm it's not the biggest anymore, but still you need at least 2x to 3x the area to get to 10gw and that's with much better settings that's what Taiwan offers
The area needed depends somewhat on where the panels are located, the north/east don't see a ton of sun for about half the year. Also, 70+% of TW is covered by mountains and dense forest. I don't mean to say it's impossible (I'd like to see a lot more solar), just that the economics aren't as good as other places.
I also wonder if building for typhoon conditions affects construction costs significantly.
$10b seems impossibly low to go fully off-grid, I expect real estate costs would dwarf panel/battery/construction costs. TSMC isn't stupid, so I assume they've explored the options in this area.
China seems happy to export solar panels to anyone.. Taiwan would probably not like to be a big importer of something it can't procure from other trade partners at similar prices though. I think Taiwan wants tariff wars with China to reduce economic ties.
Taiwan's money spends just as good as anyone's money. That's why Europe is still burning Russian gas while in a proxy war that's seen hundreds of thousands killed. It's only in Hollywood movies that you refuse perfectly good money for geopolitics.
Am I wrong to say that north stream 1 & 2 were put out of commission and Europe procures it’s gaz now via LNG that flows via the huge terminals that were built after 2022?
The Russians are managing to bypass restrictions to some degree using their “dark fleet” but that’s oil, and hardly a case of Europe continuing as if nothing were.
Of course the EU could lie, but that seems unlikely. It could also be that Russia is selling to the EU without the EU knowing it. For oil that is almost certainly the case to some extent. For LNG you need very specific infrastructure (boats, terminals) that are not compatible with the famous “dark fleet”.
Russia is probably selling the gaz to someone else, or at least trying to. But in that case at a discounted price and with less margin because pipelines cannot be improvised, so they have to use more expensive means of transport.
Mind you those figures were 2023 and they will have reduced even more most likely. But Europe is still buying gaz to some extent.
You mentioned offshore wind, is offshore solar not a thing? Seems it'd be rather easy to float a farm of them...easier than floating a giant windmill, at least.
Geo location aside, putting things off shore is really a way to drive up cost such as maintenance like mad and it makes even less sense when you are working with large surfaces rather than something designed around having height and wind tolerance.
Solar farms don't take a huge amount of space. The roof tops of the chip factories are probably a perfectly fine place to augment the chip factory electric use
