Episode
Taiwan's War on Renewables [Fully Produced Radio Show!]
- Podcast
- ChinaTalk
- Published
- Jun 30, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4513
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/CHTAL1768517968.mp3
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Summary
Welcome to another installment of the ChinaTalk radio show! Today, we’re diving into Taiwan’s war on green energy. Shenanigans abound in this episode, including: The lights-out scenario — Taiwan only holds 11 days of LNG reserves, and 97% of the island's energy is imported, but the ruling party phased out nuclear and botched the renewable rollout anyway. The offshore wind graveyard — how made-in-Taiwan components drove developers to abandon the world's best offshore wind sites, The Taipower unbundling reversal — and the Kafkaesque system that keeps electricity prices dirt cheap despite the Iran war. “Green energy cockroaches” — why corruption is Taiwan's dirtiest secret, and how the Taiwanese public came to associate renewables with scandal, The nuclear U-turn — How President Lai Ching-te walked back forty years of "Non-Nuclear Homeland" orthodoxy to restart Taiwan’s nuclear reactors. A transcript of this show with embedded source links is available on the ChinaTalk substack. This episode was produced by Lily Ottinger and Aqib Zakaria. Special thanks to "Jason Feng," Angelica Oung, Ricky Huang, Tsaiying Lu (DSET), and Yu-Hsuan Yeh (formerly of CSIS and DSET) for their time and expertise. Everyone's views are their own and don't represent any organization. If you want to learn more, check out Angelica's ongoing work on her two Substacks, Taipology and Elemental Energy. You can also check out Ricky's two podcasts, where he hosts cross-partisan debates about energy policy and more. "Jason's" voice was anonymized with ElevenLabs' text-to-speech tools. Finally, we know Angelica is a controversial figure, but we decided to interview her because, on energy policy specifically, her views are shared by a not-insubstantial portion of the Taiwanese public. [See: this poll which r…