廈金通電 不能只算30億元 — “The Xiamen–Kinmen Power Link Is Not Just a NT$3 Billion Question” (自由時報 Liberty Times, Taiwan)
I have an op-ed in the 自由時報 (Liberty Times) — one of Taiwan’s major dailies — titled 《廈金通電 不能只算30億元》, “The Xiamen–Kinmen power link is not just a NT$3 billion question.”
The argument
Kinmen legislator Chen Yu-chen (陳玉珍) has been making the case in the Legislative Yuan for buying electricity from Fujian: roughly NT$3 billion (30 億元) in savings per year. The figure is real — that is a genuine reduction in Taipower’s losses. It simply says nothing about the costs that matter.
The blind spot is the dependency mechanism, not the headline price. If cross-strait power stays durably cheaper than local generation, dispatch will drift toward it on its own. Kinmen’s own units will run fewer hours, their maintenance and spare parts will become harder to justify, and the fallback capacity will erode without anyone ever deciding to give it up.
Hence three safeguards to write into the rules before any interconnection:
- The grid stays under Taiwanese control.
- The maintenance budget for local generating units does not shrink in proportion to their running hours.
- Regular islanding tests confirm that Kinmen can hold without outside power.
My conclusion: a low price can be a bargaining condition, but it cannot become the reason there is no way back. Public money should fund Taiwan’s own backup capacity rather than let it fade as imported electricity becomes the convenient option.