The solar strategy – approved by the island nation’s government this week – expects about 900MW of the initial 1.5GW to comprise rooftop deployments on commercial and government-owned buildings, with the remainder coming from ground-mounted arrays “at salt-production land, severe land-subsidence areas, lakes and ponds, landfills and contaminated land”.
The two-year build-out programme could attract NT$91.2bn ($2.9bn) of investment, said a government statement.
The new capacity will bring Taiwan’s total solar base to 2.46GW by June 2018, it added.
The statement gives no details on specific incentives for the two-year solar programme, saying the Ministry of Economic Affairs will “set up a single window for promoting installations, take stock of available installation space, improve electric grid planning, attract more investments, and amend laws and regulations”. Taiwan raised its feed-in tariff (FIT) for PV installations last year.
Taiwan has a 20% renewables share target for its power sector by 2025, by when it wants to have 20GW of solar in place. The government statement said 17GW of that will be made up of ground-mounted PV with the rest on rooftops.
That represents a major upgrade on Taiwan’s previous solar targets, which foresaw 8.7GW by 2030 in a country that hosts some of the world’s biggest suppliers of PV equipment.
The pace of renewables development in the island state had been expected to quicken this year, following the landslide victory of Tsai Ing-wen’s Democratic Progressive Party in January’s presidential elections with an anti-nuclear policy stance.
Taiwan is also pursuing a significant offshore wind strategy, with the first turbines due in the water by the end of this year.
The country’s offshore ambitions have already attracted interest from major foreign players, notably Danish global market leader Dong Energy, which said earlier this year that it would set up a base in Taiwan.
