Infrastructure program built resilience, DPP says

• By Huang Chi-hao
  and Jason Pan / Staff reporters

Resilience to natural disasters in utilities infrastructure has been built up in large part thanks to the Forward-looking Infrastructure Development Program, which ensured that the east coast still had running water and electricity after Wednesday’s massive earthquake, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers said yesterday.

The temblor was the strongest in Taiwan in 25 years, “but the nation’s electricity grid ran normally, without any large-scale outages,” DPP Legislator Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) said.

Although localized outages were reported, the grid remained functioning, Lin said.

Photo: CNA

He credited the performance to the infrastructure program, which was launched in 2017 by then-premier Lin Chuan (林全) during President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) first term.

The government provided dedicated funding to build a new generation of infrastructure, including green energy projects, water projects to enhance resilience against climate change, railway projects, digital infrastructure, projects to ensure food safety and other important projects to boost the nation’s resilience, he said.

“The program has improved the nation’s basic infrastructure, allowing every household to have running water and electricity, which our citizens are now taking for granted for their daily necessities,” he said.

Lin said that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party tried to stop the program.

For example, NT$193.9 billion (US$6.05 billion) of government funding was required for water projects, including NT$10 billion to build conduits between dams in southern Taiwan to transfer water to regions to ease water shortages, Lin said.

“I would like to ask those legislators who tried to block funding for the projects if they feel any different today, or if they just take everything for granted,” he said.

Earlier, DPP Legislator Hung Sun-han (洪申翰) said that the government’s strategy to transition to renewable energy helped the nation avoid a large-scale power outage after Wednesday’s quake, unlike the Sept. 21, 1999, earthquake centered in Nantou County’s Jiji Township (集集).

“One of the main reasons electricity remained stable after this week’s earthquake was due to a large increase of solar energy farms across the nation, which ramped up generation right after the temblor to help cover overloading at some coal-fired power plants,” Hung said in an online post.

“In the past, electricity from dams was stored to be released at noon during peak demand. Now, peak times can be covered by solar farms, keeping electricity from dams to release at other times,” he said. “This also helped to cover the power supply when coal-fired plants were disrupted by the earthquake knocking down power lines.”

“Taiwan now has a new power system that is able to make quick adjustments to sudden disruptions, so we have much better equipment in place to respond to emergency situations,” Hung said, adding that these included new energy systems based on gas and water power storage.