Taipei-The Taiwan Power Company proposed a 10-year NT$188.4 billion (US$6.05 billion) project on Thursday to enhance the resilience of the national grid, after a nationwide power outage in March exposed the fragility of the “overly centralized” delivery network, officials said that day.
The blackout on March 3 showed that the “overconcentration in the power grid” was vulnerable to resiliency risks, despite the fact that the outage was mainly caused by human error, Tseng Wen-sheng (曾文生), acting president of the company, known as Taipower, told a press conference.
As a result of the outage, Taipower has created the “2022-2032 project” to complement the existing programs, which have a budget of NT$376.1 billion, that target the decentralization, modernization, and hardening of the electricity system, Wang Yao-ting (王耀庭), general manager of the company, said.
Tseng touted the undertaking, which will cost a total of NT$564.5 billion, as “the single biggest investment” that Taipower has ever made to promote grid resilience, saying that the ability to withstand potentially disruptive events would help Taiwan get prepared to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.
Taiwan’s grid is highly centralized in three main ultra-high voltage (UHV) substations, located in Longtan in Taoyuan, Chungliao in Nantou County, and Longchi in Tainan. These gather and distribute power, with three transmission lines limited to a north-south direction, according to Taipower’s news release.
As the latest example of the problem created by over-centralization, the March 3 blackout was a result of negligence during annual maintenance at Kaohsiung’s Hsinta Power Plant, which led to a circuit malfunction at the Longchi UHV Substation, leaving about 5.49 million households and businesses nationwide without power for hours, according to the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ investigation.
Among the proposed measures under the proposal, Taipower will further expand transmission lines to enable UHV users to get electricity directly from power generation units, as in the case of the two science parks in Tainan and Qiaotou in Kaohsiung where power is transferred from Hsinta Power Plant, rather than the grid, according to the company’s news release.
Taipower also plans to establish five more substations in two years and a further 28 substations in 10 years to reduce the loading of transformers in existing substations in order to prevent substation tripping, the company said.
The Executive Yuan endorsed the proposal on Aug. 19 and has set aside NT$150 billion in the annual budget request for the 2023 fiscal year for part of the implementation of the project, according to Taipower.
Taiwan also suffered two islandwide blackouts in May 2021, which were also reportedly due to problems at the Hsinta Power Plant.

Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel