The World Opinion

Your Global Perspective

Taiwan president pledges ‘infrastructure check-up’ after mass energy outage

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen on Friday vowed to scrutinize energy infrastructure and boost up ongoing efforts to strengthen grid reliability after a mass outage that left one-third of the island with out electrical energy.

Taiwan on Thursday blamed negligence all over annual repairs at a big energy plant for the outage around the island that brought about the lighting fixtures to move off for greater than 5 million families, even though the the most important semiconductor sector used to be in large part unaffected.

“The nationwide safety group has been engaging in examinations at the resilience of key infrastructure, and the day gone by’s incident is likely one of the circumstances that had to be scrutinized intently,” Tsai mentioned in a commentary.

Tsai mentioned provide used to be enough on the time of the incident and the mass outage used to be caused “just by operational negligence…which highlighted issues within the nation’s energy grid and the resilience of its key infrastructure.”

“We will have to do a whole energy infrastructure check-up and boost up works on systematic development,” Tsai mentioned, who is about to discuss with the coal-fired station within the southern town of Kaohsiung at midday.

Energy has now been restored however the outage has renewed grievance on Tsai’s electrical energy coverage, with Taiwan’s primary opposition celebration Kuomintang (KMT) calling for Financial system Minister Wang Mei-hua to step down.

Taiwan skilled two main outages in Would possibly, when the island used to be grappling with a drought and heat-wave, caused by way of a spike in call for and inadequate provide.

Taiwan, a world semiconductor powerhouse, has been looking to strengthen its grid control and spice up energy provide as call for rises amid a booming native economic system in addition to a world chip scarcity that has resulted in enlargement by way of massive chip corporations equivalent to Taiwan Semiconductor Production Co.

The outages have additionally fanned grievance of Tsai’s plan to spice up the island’s renewable power goal to twenty% and segment out nuclear energy by way of 2025.