Taipei, Oct. 13 (CNA) State-run utility Taiwan Power Co. (Taipower) will soon begin selling small amounts of green power to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Taiwan to help them meet the need for carbon reduction demanded by their clients, Economic Affairs Minister Wang Mei-hua (王美花) said Friday.
Taiwan's exporters, many of which are part of global brands' supply chains, are starting to feel pressure to cut carbon emissions from clients intent on achieving net-zero emissions by 2030, Wang said.
At present, big corporations are able to purchase renewable energy through corporate power purchase agreements (CPPA) -- long-term contracts between renewable energy producers and buyers -- but SMEs have had trouble getting access to those contracts, Wang said.
"For SMEs, one-on-one CPPAs take too much of an administrative toll," Wang said of the SMEs' difficulties.
There has also been the issue of Taiwan simply not producing enough renewable energy to meet industrial demand given the growing emphasis on reducing carbon emissions to address climate change.
In 2022, Taiwan's industrial sector consumed 56.1 percent of all electricity produced, but only 8.3 percent of all electricity produced was renewable, according to Bureau of Energy statistics.
To support the needs of SMEs, Taipower will set up a renewable energy bidding platform that will offer 10,000 kWh and 50,000 kWh batches of energy from its own solar power installations for one-year, three-year, or five-year periods.
The renewable energy will be from Taipower's Salt Field Solar Power Field in Tainan County and the Changhua Coastal solar farm, which generate roughly 300 million kWh of power a year, or about 3 percent of all the solar power Taiwan generated in 2022.
The bidding platform will be managed by the National Renewable Energy Certification Center.
According to the MOEA, it will be the first time that Taipower sells renewable energy directly to end users. Until now, it has either purchased green energy from private producers or sent green energy that it generated to the grid without specified purchasers.
The pilot program will begin by putting up a first batch of 10 million kWh for bidding at the end of October and a second batch in mid-November, according to Taipower spokesperson Tsai Chih-meng (蔡志孟).
Successful bidders will be able to claim the use of renewable energy starting in 2024, said Tsai.
The reserve price will be set at a price that takes the feed-in-tariff (FIT) rate -- a guaranteed, above-market rate that the government offered for the development of renewable energy -- for the renewable energy plants and other administrative fees into account.
That will amount to an estimated NT$4-NT$5 per kWh, according to Deputy Economic Affairs Minister Tseng Wen-sheng (曾文生).
Taiwan's Electricity Act was amended in 2017 to allow green energy producers to sell green electricity to end users by having them reserve a certain amount of power transmitted via the grid.
In 2019, the Renewable Energy Development Act was amended to allow renewable energy producers to freely choose between the government's FIT policy and selling directly to private buyers, as before the amendment those who had signed FIT agreements were tied to the 20-year FIT policy.
