Overview of wind power development over the two past decades (2000-2019) and its role in the Taiwan's energy transition and sustainable development goals

Abstract

<abstract> In response to the international agreement on the climate change and the energy supply diversification, the Taiwan government actively promoted the use of wind power since 2000. This paper highlighted the Taiwan's wind resources, and interactively analyzed the regulatory strategies for promoting wind power and trend analysis of wind power over the two past decades (2000–2019). In the first development stage, the electricity generation by onshore wind power rapidly grew from 1.38 gigawatt-hours (GW-h) in 2000 to 1,492.7 GW-h in 2011 because of the implementations of promotional measures and official subsidies. However, its growth rate became slow due to the restrictions on available land for the onshore wind power farms. With the promulgation of the Renewable Energy Development Act in 2009, the government not only declared preferable feed-in-tariff (FIT) rates, but also announced some incentive and promotional plans, focusing on offshore wind power farms from the early 2010s. Therefore, the electricity generation by offshore wind power significantly increased from 26.7 GW-h in 2018 to 175.4 GW-h in 2019. Using the data on the electricity generation by wind power in 2019 (i.e., 1,871.3 × 10⁶ kW-h) and the average default value (i.e., 0.539 kg CO₂/kW-h), the equivalent mitigation of CO₂ emission from the wind power systems in Taiwan was thus estimated to be about one million metric tons. Based on the progressive development of wind power and other renewable resources over the past two decades, one of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) for nuclear-free homeland and 20% renewable electricity generation may be prospective in the energy transition by 2025. However, this goal has faced serious challenges because the corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused the delays in the Taiwanese wind power industry. </abstract>