by Nullrasa
I found something really interesting while trying to confirm something, and I’m not sure where to post this.
So, the jist is that a world-news post brought up a fictional scenario between Taiwan and China. And a thread lead me down a rabbit hole regarding Taiwan’s energy usage. Basically, I wanted to find out if Taiwan is still as dependent on imported energy compared to 2008.
At first, I thought it had become independent of imported energy, because there’s been a lot of information and focus on its renewable projects. If you browse its Wikipedia page, a lot of focus was put into these projects. One of its references was a link to the claim that 8.7% of the country is running on renewable energy.
focustaiwan.tw/news/aipl/201408310010.aspx
But something was odd, because I can’t find any primary sources. Normally, they’d publish reports on their government website, but that’s been taken down.
Using a wayback machine, I found a report written in .doc, stating that 98% of the country is still dependent on imported energy.
The link is titled “energy supply and demand situation of Taiwan in 2014”. It’s a .doc file. The English version is in the second half. Not only have they not met their goals, but they are still very dependent on imported energy. Since two of the biggest exporters of oil (Russia and Saudi Arabia) have good relations with China, it would make sense they would try to hide this fact.