Taiwan’s blackout creates significant revenue losses for businesses

With the most recent blackout in Taiwan since 1999 as a result of a generator failure at a local power plant, the region’s power supply has been bought back into the spotlight. Impacting households and accumulating extensive financial losses for local businesses, the state of affairs has led to the resignation of Economy Minister Lee Chih-kung amongst uncertainty for businesses to continue operating in the region.

President Tsai Ing-wen has since openly apologised for what has been classed as a “human error” where equipment was being replaced at local supplier CPC Corp.

Taiwan is currently witnessing one of the hottest periods in its history, reaching a constant 36 degrees over 12 days, impacting over 5 million homes. He said: “The government is promoting distributed green energy to avoid the situation where an incident at a single power station can affect the power supply for the whole country. We will not change course. Today’s incident only makes us more determined.”

The incident has Taiwan’s ambitions and furthered its cause to move towards eradicating nuclear and coal products, and adopt natural gas and renewable energy sources by 2025. With this in mind, the region is now looking to partner with Tesla in the construction of and renewable energy storage system and build a new infrastructure in this space.

Taiwan’s Minister of Science and Technology Chen Liang-gee has said: “Tesla is using its lithium ion battery technology to help Australia and California to implement smart grid and grid storage, and we can learn from them in the future. We will try to check out whether there is a suitable solution. We will get in touch with them.”

Tesla has yet to comment, but it has already placed a stake in the Taiwanese market through its automotive division, successfully entering the market at the start of the year.