The Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) has recently planned to set up a wide range of public charging piles. Based on the net-zero conversion index, Taiwan will need 6,500 units of charging piles to meet demand by 2025. As such, it is preliminarily planned that these piles will be established at public parking lots, freeway service stations, bus transfer stations, and even department stores, as well as hypermarkets.

Impact Analysis
　　At the end of March 2022, the National Development Council (NDC) announced the net-zero path for Taiwan by 2050. One of the goals set down is to achieve a 100% market-to-sales ratio for electric vehicles/electric motorcycles in 2040. Although the number of electric vehicles (EV) in Taiwan is gradually increasing year on year, the proportion remains minimal. According to the statistics by MOTC, there are approximately more than 10,000 EVs right now in Taiwan. To increase the willingness of the public to adopt EVs, aside from setting up public charging piles, Taipower has also begun to implement an “exclusive time-slot of electricity price for EVs" in June, making the price variance between peak and off-peak electricity prices 4 times higher, which encourages owners of EVs to charge during off-peak hours. Furthermore, such a measure is also applicable to residential and commercial buildings in urban areas that have installed special power meters for EVs.

 

　　Under the global consensus for net zero emissions, governments in China, the United States and the European Union have continuously introduced policy subsidies for electric vehicles, turning electric vehicles into an irreversible global trend. According to "Electric Vehicle Outlook 2022" – the annual long-term electric vehicle outlook report released by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) – EV sales will increase to 20.6 million units by 2025. Alongside the continuous development of vehicle electrification, the demands for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), 5G Internet in vehicles and smart cockpits have increased. Further than expanding the applications of electronic components as well as helping to increase PCB usage, Fuji Chimera Research Institute of Japan pointed out in its report that the average size of PCB an EV utilizes will reach 1.5 times higher than that of traditional fuel vehicles. Other than the increase in quantity, the quality will also be upgraded simultaneously. Right now, automotive boards are mainly multi-layer ones, and they will gradually be developed towards miniaturization and high performance. Additionally, the proportion of automotive HDI products will also begin to increase, gearing towards the development of high-frequency materials and hybrid structural design concurrently. In response to the increase in usage of charging piles and power semiconductor components, thick copper plates and high heat dissipation substrates will also be in high demand. Therefore, under the influence of national policy promotion and quality upgrades, EVs are a blue ocean market with huge potential for the development of Taiwan's PCB industry in the future.