President Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday said the culprit behind Tuesday's massive blackouts was an "obviously fragile power grid" that previous administrations had failed to fix.
▲圖／翻攝自中國郵報
"Why is it that our power generation system enables one human error to cause so much damage?" she said at a press conference at the Democratic Progressive Party headquarters on Wednesday.
"The system, whether it be the design and the professionalism of its management, is obviously overly fragile, and after all these years, no proactive measures have been taken to strengthen it. If we continue to face this problem in the incorrect way, our country will face a high level of systemic risk."
At a rare news conference held before a Central Standing Committee meeting at the party headquarters, Tsai said she would like to apologize to the people of Taiwan on the behalf of her administration for the blackout.
Tsai said that to prevent the incident from occurring again, her administration would adopt "as its most important mission" the task of improving the power grid.
A stable power supply is a matter of national security, she said.
Also on Wednesday, Premier Lin Chuan (林全) apologized twice for the power outage, which he said was due to a human error and "had nothing to do with the operating reserve."
The outage had occurred after a human technical error by a subcontracted engineer, who failed to switch fuel valves from automatic to manual controls, according to CPC Corp.
Former Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) objected to the premier's assessment on Wednesday, saying that the outage had really been caused by "populism hijacking the steering wheel from professionalism."
Although the economics minister has stepped down to take responsibility and the Executive Yuan had identified a human technical error at CPC Corp, "we all know that the real reason for the error is the Tsai administration's incorrect energy policy," Jiang posted to social media.
After being elected to office in 2016 on an anti-nuclear plank, the Democratic Progressive Party pulled the plug on Nuclear Power Plant No. 4 and immediately decommissioned generators at No. 1 and No. 2, he said.
This has taken nuclear power from 18 percent to 12 percent of Taiwan's energy mix, with renewables unable to make up the shortfall, he said.
The administration also lowered the maximum operating reserve from 15 percent to 10 percent, saying that 15 percent was too high.
Due to these measures, Taiwan's operating reserve declined to hover at about 3 percent, where it was easily pushed over the edge into blackouts, he said.
The former premier defended his administration's policy with Nuclear Plant No. 4, saying that even if the plant had been commissioned, Taiwan would still have become nuclear-free by 2055.
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