Promotion strategies for renewable energy in Taiwan

To promote the development and application of renewable energy, under the planning and execution of Bureau of Energy of Ministry of Economical Affairs (BOEMOEA), Taiwan has implemented many measures for subsidizing the installation of RE apparatus since 2000. Besides subsidizing the installing expenses, Taiwanese government also provides incentive measures of finance/tax, such as investment deduction and accelerating depreciation. The successive growth of the amount of installing cases has apparently constructed the base of promotion and application of renewable energy; on the other hand, many barriers to be overcome were continuously discovered during the executing processes. To effectively remove these promoting barriers, the Energy Commission (the pre-BOE) issued "Renewable Energy Development Plan" through the endorsement of Executive Yuan in January 2002. The purpose of this plan is to establish an inter-ministerial coordinating mechanism of a higher administrative level, which may focus all resources to be functioned as a working team. In the meantime, to further establish a systematically promoting mechanism, the Bureau of Energy then pushes the legislation of "Renewable Energy Development Bill". According to the drafted plan of this law, the power capacity of renewable energies will be 12% share of the national power installation capacity by 2020. Furthermore, in the Nuclear-free Homeland National Conference held in June 2003, government planned that the power capacity of renewable energy must reach 10% of the total power capacity in the nation by 2010. However, the share of the power capacity of renewable energy to the national power installation capacity is only 6.17%, currently, so there is still a lot of growing space for the development of renewable energy in Taiwan.