Chapter 4: Results
4.5 Projections
maintenance as well as age of equipment. This data would have substantially altered the availability data of nuclear facilities, which is covered in more detail in the next section.
Third, GADS does have some serious limitations. The GADS tables make it
somewhat difficult to find historical availability and capacity, and data only goes back to 2011 currently. Additionally, power composition of North America is quite different from Taiwan, with much heavier reliance on hydroelectric resources not available in Taiwan.
4.5 Projections
Taipower and the Ministry of Economic Affairs have both developed long term projections about electrical supply and demand. The MOEA “National long-term load forecasting and Power Development Plan Summary Report” was last updated in 2014. The Taipower “2016 Long Term Power Development Report” was just released in May 2016.
This section will evaluate these projections in terms of Average Individual Availability and Average Individual Generation (for solar and wind). Initial cogeneration numbers are based on capacity factors, while the projections take MOEA’s assumptions. MOEA’s assumptions about capacity for waste, biomass, and geothermal are also accepted, since there isn’t other information available.
The baseline for the Taipower and MOEA projections are substantially different.
While it is true that the MOEA report was compiled in 2014, and the Taipower report in 2016 it is unclear what underlying calculations caused them to have such significant variations.
Even the installed capacity figures vary substantially. The only obvious difference is that the MOEA report includes cogeneration, biomass, and waste in their long term plans. The Taipower information from 2015 does include these sources in its previous generation, as well as IPP sources, which are not normally found in Taipower reports.
The MOEA report explores two scenarios: Scenario 1 where Taiwan’s Nuclear facilities have their lifetimes extended. Scenario 2 where the plants are mothballed on schedule. Both scenarios assume that the fourth facility, the Lungmen Nuclear Power Plant,
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48 will be sealed for the foreseeable future. Given the current political climate and the promise of the current administration to close nuclear plants as soon as possible, only the second scenario was followed.
Figure 4.5.1: Comparison of MOEA 2014 and Taipower 2016 long term development reports
The Average Individual Availability was calculated based on the same 2015 numbers derived in the previous section. As mentioned before, these numbers have an unusual skew due to political stonewalling of the restart of the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant Unit 1, which while offline is still listed as installed capacity, and therefore drags numbers down.
The data suggests that MOEA’s projections may be extremely optimistic. To begin with, the MOEA report anticipates both a higher installed capacity and a much higher load than the actual figures from this year. As noted in previous sections, the MOEA long term report from 2013 also had similar flaws. It is possible that these reports did not anticipate the sluggishness of Taiwan’s economy, which in turn would lead to less electrical consumption.
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49 It is also possible that they did not anticipate the political firestorm surrounding the future of Taiwan’s nuclear power systems. Nuclear power in Taiwan has the highest ratio of capacity to availability of any source of power, and any distortion or disruption in nuclear generation has a much stronger impact on generating capacity than other sources.
Given the strong impact of nuclear power on total generation and availability, an alternative scenario has been plotted assuming that all nuclear facilities operate at 100%
availability for the remainder of their established lifetimes. Though it is unlikely that they would have such a high uptime - needing to at a minimum refueling every 2 years - and it is politically
unlikely the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant unit to resume operation without substantial political changes.
Figure 4.5.2: Taiwan 2015 Average Availability Assuming 100% Nuclear Availability It is clear that both the MOEA and Taipower figures are relying on higher reliability figures for Taiwan’s existing nuclear plants than the political climate would allow. Only with all nuclear plants operating at full availability do their analyses make any sense. Even so, the
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50 MOEA’s projections remain extremely optimistic, and Taipower’s are to a lesser extent.
Using these figures, we can clearly see Taiwan has a generating deficit due to the nuclear shortage.
Part of the differences in the MOEA and Taipower figures could be explained by cogeneration. The MOEA report does make note of planned guaranteed peak power
supplies from cogenerators. The second possible explanation is that MOEA’s report uses the earliest possible start date for new Taipower generation, while the Taipower report provides a multiyear range. Taipower is planning to install more than 11 GW of new thermal
generation over the next ten years - but the initialization dates for those sources are given as a long range of years, while the MOEA report seems to take the earliest possible start date at face value.
Additionally, many of the MOEA figures for renewables are overly optimistic compared with historical data. These factors alone still do not explain the higher MOEA numbers, but begin to explain the differences. Other possibilities include the unexpected slow economic growth, which would in turn lead to reduced consumption.