Taiwan’s laboured energy transition is straining its industry, with sudden electricity price jumps and growing outage risks affecting companies including Asia’s biggest — the semiconductor giant TSMC.
Following a series of price increases, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company now expects to pay more for power in its home country than anywhere else. The world’s largest chipmaker operates plants in the US and Japan and is building one in Germany.
“Basically, the price has doubled in the past few years. So next year, we think that [the] electricity price for us in Taiwan will be the highest in all the regions that we operate,” Wendell Huang, chief financial officer, told investors last month.
Although the pace of Taiwan’s power price increases since 2022 is still slower than in some other energy import-dependent advanced economies such as France and South Korea, government researchers expect industrial electricity cost to exceed that in Japan and South Korea, Taiwan’s closest competitors in export markets.
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East Asia’s energy export dependency is both a curse and a blessing tbh. I don’t know that they would have industrialized so thoroughly if they could instead live as petrostates.