Power outages have hit Taoyuan 20 times over the past two weeks. The latest blackout struck Sunday night, affecting thousands in Bade, Daxi, and Pingzhen districts. A Taoyuan City councilor took to Facebook to complain, speculating that Taoyuan was being deliberately targeted. Taipower has come forward to explain.

Once again, the streetlights are out in Taoyuan. Hot pot restaurants and coffee shops were forced to close Sunday evening in Bade, Daxi and Pingzhen, as 3,205 electricity customers were left in the dark. The blackout lasted from 8:55 to 9:50 p.m.

Shop owner
It lasted about half an hour. We packed diners’ food to take home.

This blackout was caused by a malfunction in an elbow cable connector, not by a power shortage. But the outage was one of many: Taoyuan has lost power 20 times in the past half month. Among Taoyuan’s 13 districts, only Luzhu and Guanyin have been spared. KMT city councilor Ling Tao took to social media to complain, asking why rampant outages were exclusive to Taoyuan and Linkou. He speculated that Taoyuan was being targeted intentionally, or that it had been neglected during power grid updates. He questioned why Taoyuan was experiencing so many outages, when it hosted major power infrastructure like the Shihmen Reservoir and Datan Power Plant.

Chen Hung-yin
Taipower
The power outages aren’t intentionally targeting Taoyuan. We have a lot of large industrial users that consume a lot of electricity, so that means there are a lot of feeder lines. The seasonal changes since April mean that we’ve been entering a risky period of maintenance challenges. So it could seem as if there are slightly more frequent service interruptions in Taoyuan.

According to Taipower data, equipment malfunctions caused nine of Taoyuan’s recent blackouts. The remainder were caused by snakes, ants, birds, or trees that fell on or touched power infrastructure. Every day, more than 2,400 Taipower employees are on duty round the clock to fix issues. The company has also allotted a budget to strengthen the power lines in Taoyuan and trim back nearby tree branches. The company called on politicians not to start conspiracy theories or to ignore the hard work of Taipower staff.

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