by Tony T. L. Liao Taiwan Power Company R.O.C.
In view of the scarcity of the indigenous energy resources in Taiwan and the impact of two oil crises experienced in the 1980s, Taipower began to pay attention to the OTEC technology in early 1980. A multi-year plan was set to appraise the feasibility of developing OTEC and a series of studies have been conducted since 1981. The bathy-metric survey show that sea bathen along the east coast is extremely steep and there are some sites with depths of about 1,000m at a distance of 4 kilometers offshores. The annual temperature difference between the sea surface and 1000-meter depth at these sites is about 20¢XC. This given us a promising ocean environment for OTEC development. The feasibility and conceptual design studies were conducted in 1985, and indicate that OTEC development is not economically feasible, it was confirmed that Taiwan is endowed with good potential for OTEC development. Besides, a feasibility study of the multiple purpose OTEC project was carried out by Taipower in association with some research organizations under the Energy Development Research Fund in 1989. Recently, some further studies such as comparison of candidate sites, investigation of CWP technology and further economic evaluation on the multiple OTEC projects have been conducted in sequence by related organizations. This paper focuses primarily on the findings of these studies.