Romain Blachierby Romain Blachier
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Photo Credit: lienyuan lee/WikiCommons/CC BY 3.0
TAIWAN’S OFFSHORE WIND programme is one of the most ambitious in Asia outside China. Capacity targets run into double-digit gigawatts. A domestic supply chain is being built. European developers have anchored projects off the western coast. The strategic ambition is real.
Behind that ambition, the structural picture is harder. Adrien Simorre, journalist in Taipei and author of an October 2024 study for the French Institute for International Relations (Ifri), notes that by 2025, “80% of Taiwan’s electricity will still come from fossil fuels.” He frames that dependence as the island’s “real Achilles’ heel of national security.”
Building a renewable system at speed, on those starting conditions, raises a governance question — one that France is also navigating, though from a very different mix.
Two Grids, Two Trajectories
IN 2025, France produced 547.5 TWh of electricity. 95.2% was low-carbon. Grid carbon intensity stood at 19.6 gCO₂eq/kWh — among the lowest in any large economy. Hydropower delivered 62.4 TWh, wind 49.6 TWh, solar 32.9 TWh. Fossil-fired generation fell to 18.7 TWh.
Taiwan’s mix runs the other way. LNG: 48%. Coal: 35%. Renewables: 13%. Solar peaked at 15 GW, six short of the 20 GW goal. Around 83% of the island’s electricity is imported fossil fuel.
The structural reasons are well known: an island economy with limited domestic primary resources, an export-driven industrial base, decades of policy organized around supply security in a contested neighbourhood.
The aggregate is significant. With 23.4 million inhabitants — a third of France’s 68 million — Taiwan emits 12.9 tCO₂eq per capita per year. France emits 5.9 (8.2 if consumption-based imports are counted in). The gap is real, and it is one of the starting points of any honest comparison.
Chia-Wei Chao, research director at the Taiwan Climate Action Network (TCAN), reframes the question differently. Writing in Taiwan Insight in May 2025, he argues that “renewable energy development provides a vital pathway to greater resilience” for Taiwan — making energy transition “a critical component of national security, beyond its environmental imperative.” The diplomatic conversation between Paris and Taipei rarely sits at that level.
Where the Institutional Questions Sit
CLIMATE DEBATES ARGUE about megawatts and timelines. The harder questions are institutional: how the regulatory and compensation frameworks attached to new infrastructure manage the diversity of activities and communities exposed to construction.
On the tidal flats of Changhua County, where roughly seventy percent of Taiwan’s offshore capacity is being built, the existing compensation framework — designed primarily around licensed fishing vessels — has been challenged for not always reflecting the full range of coastal activities, from oyster farming to small-scale operations. The framework is evolving, and stakeholders on different sides have started to call for more inclusive design.
France faces structurally similar discussions, not always about electricity. The mega-basins of Sainte-Soline, in the Deux-Sèvres, became one of their sharpest symbols: a 628,000 m³ irrigation reservoir presented by its supporters as a response to climate-driven droughts, and contested by opponents who question its impact on the long-term management of shared water resources. On March 25, 2023, around 30,000 demonstrators converged on the site; 3,000 gendarmes blocked them; more than 200 protesters and 47 gendarmes were injured. The basins are not turbines, but the underlying question carries across: how a shared resource is managed, who participates in the decision, who carries the cost.
On energy itself, France has tried to move the conversation upstream. The 2023 Acceleration of Renewables Act (Loi APER) asks each municipality, after public consultation, to define Zones d’Accélération des Énergies Renouvelables. Inside those zones, projects benefit from streamlined permitting and stronger local backing. Outside, they face heavier scrutiny.
The mechanism is uneven. Larger cities engage faster. Smaller communes lag. Regional energy committees validate slowly. But the principle stands: a deliberate, locally anchored decision on where renewable infrastructure goes, before construction rather than after. Other jurisdictions, Taiwan included, are working through similar questions.
Citizens as Producers
THE MOST CONCRETE tool of energy democracy is also the simplest: letting people own a share of the electricity they consume.
In France, the curve is steep. Collective self-consumption operations went from 77 in 2021 to 1,625 by the end of 2025. The federation Énergie Partagée channels citizen savings into community-owned solar, wind and small hydro. In Occitanie alone, 10,000 inhabitants organized in 70 cooperatives now run 280 installations producing 60 GWh per year — the annual consumption of around 14,000 households.
In March 2025, the excise tax on self-consumed electricity was scrapped, lifting project profitability by up to 25%. The regulatory ceiling moved from 3 to 5 MW per installation. The sector is maturing.
Taiwan has been building its own version, in a tougher regulatory environment. The Chinese name carries the political claim: 公民電廠, citizen power plant.
Taromak Green Energy Company, the first of its kind, was set up by the Rukai Drekay tribe in Taitung, funded by community shares, with three stated goals: tribal autonomy, defense of traditional territory, environmental justice.
Sunnyfounder runs more than 600 crowdfunded sites and 33,000 members. It remains the only citizen power plant legally authorized to sell electricity in Taiwan. The Homemakers United Foundation’s Green Advocates Cooperative organizes residents as joint producers. Civic solar programmes have spread to Taipei’s municipal rooftops. Local groups, often backed by NGOs like the Society of Wilderness, have established seven formal energy cooperatives since 2016, with new ones coming online in Pingtung and other rural counties.
These projects matter beyond their current share of generation, which is small on both sides. They change the framing: from compensation for damage to ownership of upside. They put a new actor on the table — communities that produce, not only communities that observe.
The structural ceiling is shared. Grid access, financing and regulation still favour large operators. And the communities most exposed to siting decisions — indigenous, coastal, rural — are usually the ones with the least capital to become co-owners. Closing that gap is one of the practical agendas where progressive energy policy has a concrete contribution to make.
What Paris and Taipei Could Build Together
PARIS AND TAIPEI already cooperate on semiconductors, defense, and high-level diplomacy. The energy transition deserves its own bilateral channel, and a more horizontal one.
Four practical anchors:
— Inclusive local consultation frameworks. APER and Taiwan’s evolving offshore framework both benefit from stronger guarantees that the full range of affected communities is in the room.
— Predictable territorial returns. A share of project revenue flowing back to host territories on a stable basis, beyond one-off compensations.
— Public de-risking instruments open to cooperatives and citizen power plants on the same terms as larger developers.
— Cumulative-impact siting that considers coastal ecosystems, farmland and indigenous territories at the system level, not project by project.
Civil society in Lyon has more to say to civil society in Taipei than the protocols suggest. Both work within transitions designed in ministries, financed by global capital, and discussed in town halls and on quay sides. The conversation between French energy cooperatives, Taiwanese citizen power plants, indigenous-led projects, and the researchers following them is not yet happening at scale. It should.
The numbers leave little room. 19.6 grams of CO₂ per kilowatt-hour in France. 83% fossil dependence in Taiwan. 12.9 tonnes per capita against 5.9. Behind them sits a quieter question every grid eventually has to answer: how decisions are made, and how the results are shared.
That answer is still being written — in Taipei, in Paris, in the towns and territories that host the infrastructure on both sides.