Why Taiwan's Power Grid Is a Major National Security Risk
Taiwan’s energy industry is in grave peril. The nation’s grid is already struggling to keep up with demand, and this Achilles’ heel has not gone unnoticed by neighboring China. The island nation is heavily dependent on imports to keep its isolated energy grid up and running, and a blockade from China could send the nation’s energy security and national security into a rapid tailspin.
In May of this year, Taiwan shuttered its last remaining nuclear power plant, making good on a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) policy promise made in the wake of Japan’s 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. As a result, the country now imports nearly 100% of its energy supplies, mostly in the form of oil and gas.
“As the age of energy-hungry artificial intelligence dawns, Taiwan is facing a multifaceted energy crisis: It depends heavily on imported fossil fuels; It has ambitious clean energy targets that it is failing to meet; And it can barely keep up with current demand,” Yale360 reported in September of last year. “Addressing this problem, government critics say, is growing increasingly urgent.”
And this is to say nothing of the increasing threat of conflict. Tensions between Taiwan and China have been escalating in recent years, and experts fear that they could soon come to a head, especially in light of political uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration’s dealings with China, Taiwan, and overall approach to global conflict.
Beijing doesn’t make any efforts to hide its disdain for Taiwanese sovereignty and its desire to absorb the island as part of its One China policy, and official Chinese documents speak extensively about a “joint blockade campaign” (??????). Performative Chinese military operations have ramped up in the waters around Taiwan as a form of warning as well as protest – in 2022, China surrounded the island with missile impacts to protest Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit.
In light of the very real threat of Chinese aggression, Washington D.C.-based think tank Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) ran 26 wargames to model how a Chinese blockade of Taiwan would play out. The prognosis is grim. In all 26 scenarios, Taiwan runs out of natural gas in just about ten days, and coal and oil run out at 7 weeks and 20 weeks, respectively. Indeed, energy is the number one vulnerability for Taiwan’s national security. “Total electricity production might be reduced to 20 percent of pre-blockade electricity levels,” CSIS said, the Center’s report finds.
Taiwan’s energy grid supports 23 million people – approximately the population of Australia – on one 200th of the land area. Not only does Taiwan’s isolated grid support a particularly dense population (the 18th most dense in the world, in fact), it’s also powering one of the most advanced and energy-intensive tech sectors on the planet. Though Taiwan is home to just 0.3 percent of the global population, it hosts about 18 percent of the world’s semiconductor manufacturing capacity and 92 percent of the most advanced computer chip manufacturing capacity, according to the United States International Trade Commission.
This means that an attack on Taiwan would not only have a domestic impact, but reverberating impact throughout global supply chains. As CSIS reports, “a blockade would not just affect China, Taiwan, and the United States. The disruption of international trade, particularly restrictions on computer chip production, would affect every country on the planet.”
Furthermore, a conflict in Taiwan could quickly escalate and draw in military forces from around the world. The Council on Foreign Relations warns that “many foreign policy analysts fear a Chinese attack on Taiwan could draw the United States into a massively destructive and costly war with China.” The CSIS war games reflect this possibility, with nightmare scenarios that include attacks on American airbases in Japan and Guam in addition to Taiwanese grids.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
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