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Phasing out nuclear in Japan

All Japan’s wind farms evidently survived the recent disastrous quake and tsunami – even a semi-offshore one. With nuclear power’s reputation besmirched, following the spectacular failures at Fukushima, is that the way ahead for Japan?

Japan’s heavy reliance on nuclear (29% of electricity, compared with the global 14%) is the result of the fact that it has few indigenous fossil fuel resources and has to import most of its energy. As a small heavily populated series of islands, the potential for wind and other land-using renewable-energy technologies has sometimes been seen as limited. But Japan at one time did lead the world in solar PV development and production, and was also a pioneer, albeit on a smaller scale, in wave energy. And it played a major role in the early stages of the global negotiations on greenhouse gas reduction, hosting the UNFCC gathering at Kyoto in 1997, which gave its name to the first global climate change protocol. However banking crises and recession pressures have weakened its economy and it has retrenched on its earlier quite strong commitment to renewable energy, and in 2009 it even opposed a replacement for the Kyoto protocol, backing the weaker non-binding Copenhagen Accord.

Could its approach now be reversed? That would require a major policy shift. A 2008 US Embassy Cable recently released by Wikileaks reported outspoken criticisms of the existing approach from Lower House Diet Member Taro Kono, with the Japanese bureaucracy and power companies seen as ‘continuing an outdated nuclear energy strategy, suppressing development of alternative energy, and keeping information from Diet members and the public’.

In particular Kono claimed that the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) was committed to advocating nuclear energy development, despite the problems he attributed to it, and although METI claimed to support alternative energy, in actuality it provided little. He claimed that METI in the past had ‘orchestrated the defeat of legislation that supported alternatives energy development, and instead secured the passage of the Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS) act,’ which simply required power companies to purchase a very small amount of their electricity from alternative sources. He also said that ‘the subsidies were of such short duration that the projects have difficulty finding investors because of the risk and uncertainty involved’.

He provided a specific example of how renewables were sidelined, noting that ‘there was abundant wind power available in Hokkaido that went undeveloped because the electricity company claimed it did not have sufficient grid capacity’. But in fact ‘an unused connection between the Hokkaido grid and the Honshu grid that the companies keep in reserve for unspecified emergencies’.

New policies could obviously help. But how much energy could Japan get from wind and the other renewables? While space is a major constraint, that’s also true of the UK and Denmark, and both to varying degrees have significant renewable energy programmes, with on-land wind dominating so far. Japan could certainly do more. On-land wind installation reached 2.3 Gigawatts (GW) there in 2010, compared to 4GW in the UK and 3.5GW in Denmark, and both the latter have since pushed ahead with more, increasingly offshore.

Offshore wind is an obvious choice for Japan. One early study suggested that up to 12 GW of offshore wind capacity could be installed around Japan by 2010, generating around 39 TWh pa, about the same as was expected from then planned 17 nuclear reactor expansion programme. But that’s small compared to what is now talked of for offshore wind in the UK, with up to 32 GW off the UK coast by around 2020, and eventually perhaps 150 GW in the North Sea as whole.

The UK is also now pushing ahead with offshore wave and tidal power, aiming for perhaps 2 GW by 2020, and that is something Japan could also do. Japan pioneered wave energy in the 1970/80s, with a floating ‘Mighty Whale’ Oscillating Water Column system and some harbour wall/breakwater OWCs, but did not follow it up, in part due to its economic crisis. But research now indicates the Sea of Japan is suitable for the use of wave-power technology, while marine current technology would be better suited for power generation plants in the Pacific Ocean or the Inland Sea. It’s been estimated that ocean energy plants in coastal areas could provide generation capacity of 30–50 GW.

There are some interesting new projects emerging. For example, Nova Energy Company is setting up a tidal power project near Seto Inland Sea, using tuna fish shaped turbines as conceived by Suzuki. METI is also supporting a joint venture with the industrial and academic sectors of a combined offshore wave power and marine current powered-generation plant, with commercialization scheduled for 2016.

Although China has taken over as leader, Japan is still well placed for PV solar, with a large PV manufacturing base. In terms of deployment domestically, it started off with a ‘70,000 roofs’ programme in 1994, and it is now aiming to have 28GW installed by 2020, 10 times the 2005 level, and then boosting it to 40 times the 2005 level by 2030. Good progress has also been made on the heating side, the use of rooftop-mounted solar heat collectors is widespread in Japan, as is the use of natural geothermal heat that’s one advantage of being a geologically compromised area.

As a ‘High Tech’ player, Japan has also developed some large fuel cells, and the ‘hydrogen economy’ options are seen as increasingly important strategic industrial developments at various scales. One intriguing large-scale hydrogen economy idea is an ambitious proposal for a gas pipeline across NE Asia, to be fed with hydrogen gas (plus some methane) produced by power from wind and geothermal energy sources, and in particular the large wind energy potential that exists along the Aleutian Islands and Kamchatka Peninsula. A renewable energy-managing base would be built on one of the Kuril Islands between Japan and Russia, which would distribute the energy to eastern Russia and Japan.

That is obviously some way off, as are proposals for High Voltage Direct Current Supergrid connections around the Pacific rim, linking up a wider range renewable sources, and enabling more effective grid balancing. If renewable are to expand significantly in Japan and neighboring areas, then, to help deal with the variability of the sources, something like that will have to be developed, as is now planned in Europe.

How much might be expected from renewables in total? A 2003 report commissioned by Greenpeace – ‘Energy Rich Japan – Full renewable energy supply of Japan’ – claimed that Japan could make a full ‘transition to clean, renewable energy without any sacrifice in living standards or industrial capacity’. The report used 1999 energy data, and showed that demand could be reduced by 50% with energy efficient technologies that were already available, saving nearly 40% in the industrial sector, more than 50% in the residential and commercial sectors and about 70% in the transport sector. The report then showed how renewable energy could be used to meet that new level of demand, reducing and ultimately eliminating the need for imports. Six scenarios of how this might happen were outlined, moving up to 100% renewable energy for Japan.

Starting from a basic model (Scenario One) providing more than 50% of total energy needs from domestic renewable sources, each subsequent scenario provides variations or expansions on Scenario One, gradually reducing the reliance on imported energy, factoring in different population projections and expected improvements in renewable generation capacity and energy efficiencies, until by Scenarios Five and Six, no energy imports are required. And of course, no nuclear either.

Some of Japans nuclear capacity has, in effect, phased itself out- very painfully. It will be interesting to see if a new direction is now taken in Japan, and indeed elsewhere.

For more information, visit http://www.energyrichjapan.info.

Posted by Dave Elliott on March 19, 2011 11:57 AM | Permalink