Structuring key support measures for Taiwan´s renewable energy development policy

Most fields that are related to the management of technology experience uncertainty, and this is especially true in the planning phase of the policy related to the development of emerging technologies. In planning the policy for such a major development, committees must take into account all of the main support measures. In Taiwan, thermal and nuclear power generation are the main sources of power. However, Taiwan lacks natural resources and must import most of the coal and natural gas it uses to generate power from foreign sources. The Taiwanese government plans to develop a renewable energy industry, but, if too many support measures are considered, the policy will not be feasible. In fact, most of the support measures demonstrate interactive relationships, and it is very important to know the structure of these support measures so that the appropriate research can be planned and conducted. We reviewed and discussed this issue with experts in the Department of Energy, and, based on their input, we decided to use Social Network Analysis (SNA) and the Maximum Mean De-Entropy (MMDE) algorithm to achieve this purpose in this paper. We sought to use the interrelationships between the support measures to plan the policy for the development of renewable energy in Taiwan. It is our hope that the structure will be useful in planning feasible alternatives and that our method can be used for other policy-planning purposes.