One of the top natural gas turbine makers in the world, GE Vernova, sees big opportunities in Taiwan, which is set to phase out nuclear this year and needs more gas-fired generation to power its chip-making industry, GE Vernova’s chief executive Scott Strazik told Bloomberg in an interview published on Monday. Taiwan, which has one operational nuclear power reactor, plans to switch it off in the middle of 2025.
Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party elected in January 2016, and re-elected in 2020, has a policy of phasing out nuclear power by the end of 2025. Since 2018, Taiwan has shut down four other nuclear reactors and cancelled construction of two others following a referendum in 2021. Now that nuclear power will no longer be an option for fueling Taiwan’s industry, including its vast chip-making sector, providers of other forms of electricity are vying for slices of the pie. Offshore wind is expensive and not enough energy storage is an issue with this renewable power source. Therefore, gas turbine maker GE Vernova, which was spun off from GE last year, sees Taiwan as its fastest-growing market in Asia, CEO Strazik told Bloomberg. Taiwan’s nuclear exit “is leading to a steeper curve of replacement demand,” and “gas is the most applicable replacement to nuclear,” Strazik said. “We have a lot of opportunity in places like Taiwan that see a lot of electricity growth with chip demands in front of it,” the executive told Bloomberg. In Asia, GE Vernova is also looking to tap more opportunities in the large Southeast Asian economies Indonesia and Malaysia, where the proliferation of data centers is driving a surge in power demand, Strazik said. The rise of AI technology is fueling a global data center boom, and Asia is no exceptio