URE to build 193 MW solar park in Taiwan

• The Taiwanese PV manufacturer said the project will be the largest solar installation on the island. Construction is scheduled to being near the city of Tainan in the second half of 2020.

Taiwan’s United Renewable Energy (URE) has announced that it build a 193 MW solar project near Tainan, on the island’s southwest coast.

The solar panel supplier said that it will ship the PV modules for the installation in the first half of 2020. Upon completion, the facility will be Taiwan’s largest ground-mounted PV plant, it claimed, without disclosing any other financial or technical details about the project.

Due to recent restrictions on the acquisition of land for large-scale PV projects in Taiwan, which pv magazine reported about last week, the authorities have deferred several schemes for big solar parks this year. However, URE believes that several of these large projects may be developed in 2020, as they could end up being key to achieving the government’s installation target of 2.2 GW for next year.

Taiwan’s cumulative installed PV capacity stood at just 3.32 GW at the end of August, URE said, citing statistics from state-owned utility Taiwan Power Co. Figures from the International Renewable Energy Agency, meanwhile, show that the island’s cumulative installed PV capacity had reached 2.62 GW by the end of last year, suggesting that roughly 706 MW was installed in the first eight months of this year. The Taiwanese government had hoped to reach 1.5 GW in 2019, but it appears that actual development is lagging far behind its ambitions.

The government unveiled its targets for 2019 and 2020 in September as part of its two-year Solar PV Promotion Plan, which is an extension of the 2017-2018 strategy that was launched in 2016. Taiwanese Premier Su Tseng-chang said at the time that the government expected around 3.7 GW of new solar capacity by 2021. The government projects that PV installations will reach 20 GW in 2025, with coming 3 GW from rooftop PV and 17 GW from ground-mounted systems.