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Nothing annoys me like these foolish headlines. Running out of electricity? Then generate some more! With grid-scale solar and batteries (Chinese production is

Nothing annoys me like these foolish headlines. Running out of electricity? Then generate some more! With grid-scale solar and batteries (Chinese production is driving prices down aggressively) you can spin up gigawatt-scale plants almost overnight, until you can cover the shortfall with nuclear or thermal plants. And, it's not like TSMC is using electricity clandestinely: they're a fantastically profitable business probably buying electricity wholesale. So, stop the stupid handwringing and expand production.

sampullman 2y ago
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.
- dv_dt 2y ago
  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
  - CatWChainsaw 2y ago
    Hello "augment" I see you've been doing some heavy lifting lately, looking good.
- Retric 2y ago
  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.
  - XorNot 2y ago
    A chip fabricator cannot run off intermittent power. It can't shutdown quickly, nor safely.
    - Retric 2y ago
      You can get 99.99+% uptime from a system only fed solar power. It’s the same cost vs reliability tradeoff made everywhere else. France recently went weeks with every single nuclear power plant in the country offline, but the system was designed to cope with such downtime.
      - bobthepanda 2y ago
        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.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        Retric 2y ago
        Which suggests ramping up nuclear would be problematic in the long term for them. At the beginning you can get great uptime but eventually you face years like this: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-figure28_nuke_france_dailyunavailabilities2021.pdf https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-figure2...
        bobthepanda 2y ago
        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
        2y ago
- silisili 2y ago
  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.
  - pvaldes 2y ago
    China would find an excuse to attack anything put in "their" sea.
  - huac 2y ago
    shouldn't there be more clouds over ocean, as that is where the clouds tend to form?
  - metaphor 2y ago
    > Seems it'd be rather easy to float a farm of them Geopolitical threats aside, I imagine floating a farm would be the least of challenges[1]. [1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/80/1/1520-0477_1999_080_0067_tatcua_2_0_co_2.xml https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/80/1/1520-04...
    - gomerspiles 2y ago
      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.
- churchill 2y ago
  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.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Would they be able to procure that many panels from China when they know they'll end up in Taiwan though?
    - churchill 2y ago
      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.
      - generic92034 2y ago
        > It's only in Hollywood movies that you refuse perfectly good money for geopolitics. So why did Russia stop delivering gas via Nord Stream 1 from 09/2022 on (before the sabotage)?
        diogocp 2y ago
        Because they weren't getting paid in "perfectly good money" (they were getting paid into frozen EU bank accounts).
      - ArnoVW 2y ago
        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.
- foobarian 2y ago
  I love that Taiwan has 20 peaks over 3km. Such a small island for that kind of geography!
lugu 2y ago
Gaz would be perfect if there wasn't a risk of Chinese blockade. Renewable would be great if there was land and no typhoon. Nuclear would be great if quakes were not a thing. The problem isn't to price electricity. It is to find a viable long term strategy for an open society having to mitigate multiple risks.
- churchill 2y ago
  All these issues you just raised are not unique to Taiwan - everyone in the region has them yet they're expanding energy production. I mean China, specifically. If you want a zero-risk energy source, you can live in the dark, stumbling around with candles. And it's more environmentally friendly :)
  - lm28469 2y ago
    You might want to check a map if you don't see the difference between China and Taiwan. It's an island, it's small as fuck and half of it is a mountain range
cladopa 2y ago
The population density of Taiwan is 649 people per square kilometre. In the US it is 38. So that means in the US you can use renovables and the same space needs to satisfy the demand of 17 times less people than in Taiwan. In other words: it doesn't make any sense in Taiwan. Also It doesn't make any sense to close your nuclear plants, specially when China could invade you any day of the week and destroy anything you have offshore in hours. if the US abandons Ukraine support after two years, it would mean that it will abandon Taiwan too. Nuclear deterrent is real.
- churchill 2y ago
  Unless Taiwan is crammed so full that people can't move, they can easily source 200 KM² to increase their electricity capacity by 10% (i.e., roughly 20TWh). if they realise it's a national security/economic competitiveness issue, they will solve it. Otherwise, what do you suggest they do? Nothing? Or keep hand-wringing with articles like this?
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > they can easily source 200 KM² to increase their electricity capacity by 10% Solar panels are by definition easy to see and thus knock out remotely. > what do you suggest they do Nukes. We’ve seen from Ukraine that they’re given special status even in war.
    - Panzer04 2y ago
      What's that even supposed to mean? Renewable generation would be much more secure than comparable centralised generation because you'd need so many more resources to knock it out. If i were an adversary I'd much rather my enemy source everything from a single NPP than hundreds of square km of solar.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > you'd need so many more resources to knock it out If you're America, yes. If you're an island nation defending against China one hundred and ten miles away, you don't have the air defence resources to protect your entire island. (And they do have the resources to knock hout hundreds of square kilometres of solar.)
chollida1 2y ago
> With grid-scale solar and batteries (Chinese production is driving prices down aggressively) you can spin up gigawatt-scale plants almost overnight, until you can cover the shortfall with nuclear or thermal plants. Can you show an existence proof of someone spinning up gigawatts of energy overnight? And solar doesn't help with night time and batteries haven't hit giagawatt scale yet, you might be a bit over your skiis with your claim here.
- mgiampapa 2y ago
  Well technically, every time the sun comes up those panels start producing all over the world. FYI, it happens because the earth is spinning.
- Ringz 2y ago
  „China is installing the wind and solar equivalent of five large nuclear power stations per week„ https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewable-energy-boom-breaks-records/104086640 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa... The report is here: https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/MONTHLY-CHINA-ENERGY-UPDATE-_-China-to-Achieve-its-2030-Energy-Target-in-July-2024.pdf https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/...
simonw 2y ago
"With grid-scale solar and batteries..." From the article: > “The problem with solar in Taiwan is that we don’t have a big area. We have the same population as Australia and use the same amount of electricity, but we are only half the size of Tasmania, and 79 percent of Taiwan is mountainous, so land acquisition is difficult.” Rooftop solar is expensive, and roof space is sometimes needed for other things, such as helicopter pads, public utilities, or water tanks.
- thatsit 2y ago
  helicopter pads… are you serious? so the whole freaking country is a helicopter pad? Maybe a warm welcome for the CCP? It’s not that hard putting some solar panels on buildings. Helicopter pads as a general excuse is the dumbest i have ever heard.
  - Barrin92 2y ago
    >so the whole freaking country is a helicopter pad? the whole country is people living in 10 story apartment buildings. Taiwan looks like this[1], not like suburban Texas where everyone lives in 2k square feet mansions. The very limited roof space/dweller ratio you have in a country like this is indeed used for water storage, helicopter pads, what have you. If you're in a country so sparsely populated where home's are so large that a house can power itself with solar maybe roof solar makes some difference, in a place where you can slap 2 solar panels on a building of 300 people it really doesn't. [1]https://img.static-kl.com/images/media/54842792-60B3-4C6E-A925757FCD1B121A https://img.static-kl.com/images/media/54842792-60B3-4C6E-A9...

sampullman 2y ago

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.

dv_dt 2y ago
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
- CatWChainsaw 2y ago
  Hello "augment" I see you've been doing some heavy lifting lately, looking good.
Retric 2y ago
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.
- XorNot 2y ago
  A chip fabricator cannot run off intermittent power. It can't shutdown quickly, nor safely.
  - Retric 2y ago
    You can get 99.99+% uptime from a system only fed solar power. It’s the same cost vs reliability tradeoff made everywhere else. France recently went weeks with every single nuclear power plant in the country offline, but the system was designed to cope with such downtime.
    - bobthepanda 2y ago
      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.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - Retric 2y ago
        Which suggests ramping up nuclear would be problematic in the long term for them. At the beginning you can get great uptime but eventually you face years like this: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-figure28_nuke_france_dailyunavailabilities2021.pdf https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/wnisr2022-figure2...
        bobthepanda 2y ago
        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
        2y ago
silisili 2y ago
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.
- pvaldes 2y ago
  China would find an excuse to attack anything put in "their" sea.
- huac 2y ago
  shouldn't there be more clouds over ocean, as that is where the clouds tend to form?
- metaphor 2y ago
  > Seems it'd be rather easy to float a farm of them Geopolitical threats aside, I imagine floating a farm would be the least of challenges[1]. [1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/80/1/1520-0477_1999_080_0067_tatcua_2_0_co_2.xml https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/80/1/1520-04...
  - gomerspiles 2y ago
    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.
churchill 2y ago
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.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Would they be able to procure that many panels from China when they know they'll end up in Taiwan though?
  - churchill 2y ago
    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.
    - generic92034 2y ago
      > It's only in Hollywood movies that you refuse perfectly good money for geopolitics. So why did Russia stop delivering gas via Nord Stream 1 from 09/2022 on (before the sabotage)?
      - diogocp 2y ago
        Because they weren't getting paid in "perfectly good money" (they were getting paid into frozen EU bank accounts).
    - ArnoVW 2y ago
      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.
foobarian 2y ago
I love that Taiwan has 20 peaks over 3km. Such a small island for that kind of geography!

lugu 2y ago

Gaz would be perfect if there wasn't a risk of Chinese blockade. Renewable would be great if there was land and no typhoon. Nuclear would be great if quakes were not a thing. The problem isn't to price electricity. It is to find a viable long term strategy for an open society having to mitigate multiple risks.

churchill 2y ago
All these issues you just raised are not unique to Taiwan - everyone in the region has them yet they're expanding energy production. I mean China, specifically. If you want a zero-risk energy source, you can live in the dark, stumbling around with candles. And it's more environmentally friendly :)
- lm28469 2y ago
  You might want to check a map if you don't see the difference between China and Taiwan. It's an island, it's small as fuck and half of it is a mountain range

cladopa 2y ago

The population density of Taiwan is 649 people per square kilometre. In the US it is 38. So that means in the US you can use renovables and the same space needs to satisfy the demand of 17 times less people than in Taiwan. In other words: it doesn't make any sense in Taiwan. Also It doesn't make any sense to close your nuclear plants, specially when China could invade you any day of the week and destroy anything you have offshore in hours. if the US abandons Ukraine support after two years, it would mean that it will abandon Taiwan too. Nuclear deterrent is real.

churchill 2y ago
Unless Taiwan is crammed so full that people can't move, they can easily source 200 KM² to increase their electricity capacity by 10% (i.e., roughly 20TWh). if they realise it's a national security/economic competitiveness issue, they will solve it. Otherwise, what do you suggest they do? Nothing? Or keep hand-wringing with articles like this?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > they can easily source 200 KM² to increase their electricity capacity by 10% Solar panels are by definition easy to see and thus knock out remotely. > what do you suggest they do Nukes. We’ve seen from Ukraine that they’re given special status even in war.
  - Panzer04 2y ago
    What's that even supposed to mean? Renewable generation would be much more secure than comparable centralised generation because you'd need so many more resources to knock it out. If i were an adversary I'd much rather my enemy source everything from a single NPP than hundreds of square km of solar.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > you'd need so many more resources to knock it out If you're America, yes. If you're an island nation defending against China one hundred and ten miles away, you don't have the air defence resources to protect your entire island. (And they do have the resources to knock hout hundreds of square kilometres of solar.)

chollida1 2y ago

> With grid-scale solar and batteries (Chinese production is driving prices down aggressively) you can spin up gigawatt-scale plants almost overnight, until you can cover the shortfall with nuclear or thermal plants. Can you show an existence proof of someone spinning up gigawatts of energy overnight? And solar doesn't help with night time and batteries haven't hit giagawatt scale yet, you might be a bit over your skiis with your claim here.

mgiampapa 2y ago
Well technically, every time the sun comes up those panels start producing all over the world. FYI, it happens because the earth is spinning.
Ringz 2y ago
„China is installing the wind and solar equivalent of five large nuclear power stations per week„ https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewable-energy-boom-breaks-records/104086640 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa... The report is here: https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/MONTHLY-CHINA-ENERGY-UPDATE-_-China-to-Achieve-its-2030-Energy-Target-in-July-2024.pdf https://climateenergyfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/...

simonw 2y ago

"With grid-scale solar and batteries..." From the article: > “The problem with solar in Taiwan is that we don’t have a big area. We have the same population as Australia and use the same amount of electricity, but we are only half the size of Tasmania, and 79 percent of Taiwan is mountainous, so land acquisition is difficult.” Rooftop solar is expensive, and roof space is sometimes needed for other things, such as helicopter pads, public utilities, or water tanks.

thatsit 2y ago
helicopter pads… are you serious? so the whole freaking country is a helicopter pad? Maybe a warm welcome for the CCP? It’s not that hard putting some solar panels on buildings. Helicopter pads as a general excuse is the dumbest i have ever heard.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >so the whole freaking country is a helicopter pad? the whole country is people living in 10 story apartment buildings. Taiwan looks like this[1], not like suburban Texas where everyone lives in 2k square feet mansions. The very limited roof space/dweller ratio you have in a country like this is indeed used for water storage, helicopter pads, what have you. If you're in a country so sparsely populated where home's are so large that a house can power itself with solar maybe roof solar makes some difference, in a place where you can slap 2 solar panels on a building of 300 people it really doesn't. [1]https://img.static-kl.com/images/media/54842792-60B3-4C6E-A925757FCD1B121A https://img.static-kl.com/images/media/54842792-60B3-4C6E-A9...