Taiwan's Ministry of Environment last week announced the formation of what it calls a "biogas power national team" — a formal alliance of government agencies, industry players, and academic institutions aimed at converting organic waste from agriculture, livestock, food processing, and households into electricity.
The central government plans to commit NT$30 billion over six years, projecting that the initiative could produce the equivalent of 1.36 billion kilowatt-hours of green electricity annually while reducing external environmental costs by NT$78.1 billion.
On the surface, the policy is unimpeachable. In an era of decarbonization and renewable energy expansion, promoting biogas sits squarely within accepted environmental orthodoxy — it is, in the most literal political sense, impossible to oppose.
A closer look, however, raises serious questions about cost-effectiveness and the risk of repeating the governance failures that plagued Taiwan's earlier green energy push.
The Economics Don't Hold Up
Start with the arithmetic. The government proposes spending NT$30 billion to generate 1.36 billion kilowatt-hours of biogas electricity per year. That implied cost is strikingly high by any benchmark.
For comparison: in 2019, state utility Taiwan Power Company purchased two natural gas turbine units from GE — each with a generating capacity of 1.1 million kilowatts — for a combined NT$37.5 billion, or roughly NT$18.75 billion per unit. A single such turbine, running at full capacity year-round, could theoretically produce around 9.636 billion kilowatt-hours annually.
The contrast is stark. NT$30 billion in biogas investment yields an estimated 1.36 billion kilowatt-hours per year. NT$18.75 billion in a single natural gas unit yields a theoretical 9.636 billion kilowatt-hours per year.
That is not a marginal difference — it is roughly a tenfold gap. Factor in the shorter operational lifespan of biogas equipment compared to gas turbines, and the disparity widens further.
Electricity generation is, at its core, a commercial operation. Power must be produced at a price that consumers and the grid can sustain. When one generation method costs dramatically more than its alternatives, the case for promoting it at scale requires more than environmental enthusiasm — it requires rigorous justification.
The Ministry of Environment has not provided one.
Thirty Years Of Limited Results Should Give Pause
Taiwan is not new to biogas. The island has been experimenting with biogas and other forms of bioenergy generation for more than three decades.
Despite that history, bioenergy's share of total electricity generation remains below one percent. That figure reflects not policy neglect, but the straightforward reality that biogas power has never proven commercially competitive.
This track record deserves candor. Committing NT$30 billion to an industry with thirty years of limited viability demands a detailed, professional cost-benefit analysis — not a policy driven by ideological commitment to green energy.
Taiwan has already paid a steep price for energy decisions shaped more by conviction than evidence. The previous administration's anti-nuclear push saddled the island with serious energy and environmental costs running into the trillions of New Taiwan dollars. That lesson should not need to be learned twice.
The Bigger Risk: Repeating Solar Energy's Governance Failures
The more pressing concern is political, not technical. Taiwan's solar power expansion over the past decade was marred by a persistent pattern of cronyism — politically connected developers, opaque land deals, and cases of outright corruption.
The question now is whether the biogas national team is designed to avoid repeating that pattern, or whether it is structurally set up to reproduce it.
The answer turns on one uncomfortable economic reality: because biogas power cannot survive on market terms, it depends entirely on government support to function.
That dependency creates exactly the conditions in which officials accumulate enormous discretionary power — over who receives contracts, how subsidies are allocated, and which projects win approval. Where official discretion is wide and market discipline is absent, the space for political manipulation expands accordingly.
Taiwan's solar and wind energy programs demonstrated just how quickly that space gets filled.
The Ministry of Environment has not yet explained how this initiative will avoid these governance risks. That explanation is urgently needed before NT$30 billion is committed.
Not All Biogas Applications Deserve The Same Scrutiny
To be fair, not every component of this initiative merits equal skepticism. Capturing methane from livestock waste for power generation serves a genuine dual purpose: it produces electricity while reducing the environmental damage caused by untreated animal waste. That application is reasonable and worth supporting.
Far harder to justify would be any ambition to expand into crop-based bioenergy — using agricultural produce as feedstock for electricity generation. Countries that have built competitive bioenergy sectors, Brazil being the most cited example, possess natural advantages that Taiwan simply does not have: vast areas of tropical, humid land suited to high-yield energy crops.
Taiwan lacks those conditions entirely. Any attempt to replicate crop-based bioenergy at meaningful scale would almost certainly fail a rigorous cost-benefit test, and the government should not spend public money arriving at that conclusion the hard way.
It is worth noting that even Brazil's bioenergy model — despite its formidable natural advantages — faces legitimate environmental scrutiny over land use, water consumption, and fertilizer inputs. The environmental case for crop-based bioenergy is not as clean as its proponents suggest.
What Hat The Ministry Of Environment Must Do Differently
Taiwan's Ministry of Environment should bring professional rigor to this initiative, not green ideology. Where biogas demonstrably reduces pollution — particularly in livestock waste management — it deserves targeted support. Where the economics do not work, public money should not paper over the gap.
Most critically, the governance structure of this national team must be transparent and genuinely insulated from the kind of political favoritism that has damaged public trust in Taiwan's renewable energy programs.
NT$30 billion is a serious commitment of public resources. Taiwanese taxpayers deserve a serious accounting of how it will be spent — and a credible assurance that it will not become another vehicle for the well-connected to profit at everyone else's expense.
Original Article in Chinese
