Japan and Taiwan: Growing with Clean Energy

        Japan has continuously thrived towards solar energy and other renewable energy sources (as well as being a nation of energy storage), after an earthquake occurred in destroying Fukushima, a nuclear power plant, in March 2011. The government had put in place generous amounts of subsidies for alternative energy development. Both IHS and Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that Japan will be growing extensively towards solar energy than any other country, with the exception of China, in 2013.
        The natural disaster affecting the destruction of Fukushima has also triggered Taiwan to re-evaluate its nuclear power policy and has stirred protests against the construction of a fourth nuclear power plant, which is nearing its completion.
        Taiwan is also subsidizing clean energy and is planning to increase solar and wind energy development. Late last year, the government had raised the 2013 target for new solar energy by 30% to 130 megawatts. Not only this but Taiwan is actually home to major solar cell makers. By promoting more production of solar energy, this would help Taiwan's domestic solar manufacturers, who have been lately devastated by an oversupply of solar cells in the global market over the past two years. This, in turn, has caused prices to crash and forced many solar manufacturers to go out of business.
        However, one of the largest Taiwanese solar cell makers, Neo Solar Power, recently had announced a survival plan to merge with another Taiwanese solar cell maker, DelSolar. Neo Solar had claimed that the combined company will have "close to 2 gigawatts" of production capacity, which would be comparable to First Solar Inc.'s capacity of 1.9 gigawatts.

Miaoli, Taiwan