Archive for the 'Japanese energy law' category

12.2 GW of New Solar Approved Until February in Japan

May 17 2013 Published by under Japanese energy law

The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Trade just published figures for renewable energy under the new feed-in tariff law in force since last July. Thanks to this tweet by Hiro Matsubara for the link.

To state the result in very short terms, wind is struggling even with the very high tariffs in place, and solar is headed for the “rocket start” former Prime Minister Noda called for last October.

The Japanese figures come in two flavors. One set is for installations that have started producing electricity, and the other one is for installations that have received approval from the Ministry. The latter one is the higher one, it includes capacity that will come online shortly, but is not yet commissioned.

Using those latter figures, solar recorded 12.2 GW until February. That’s not bad, considering that Japan had only about 5.3 GW of solar installed at the end of 2011. Adjusting for the larger population of Japan this is comparable to the German records of the last couple of years. Not bad at all.

On the other hand, the rocket for wind energy is still firmly planted on the ground. The Ministry reports a measly anemic 0.6 GW of approved capacity. The problem with wind is, you need much more time from starting a project to getting it to the approval stage. Anyway, it will take some time for wind to get up to speed  in Japan. The numbers are still very disappointing.

The new solar capacity is spread rather evenly all over the country. The interesting thing is that the biggest chunk is located in Hokkaido, the most northern island. It certainly does not have the best solar resources. But I assume it is easier to find the land for megasolar projects there. Hokkaido has about 1.13 GW, with 0.97 of that coming from projects with over 1 MW capacity.

 

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Japanese Energy Statistics For 2011 Released

Apr 12 2013 Published by under Japanese energy law

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry just released final numbers on the energy sector in Japan for 2011. Reporting is rather slow compared to Germany, where we already have the numbers for last year.

From that we learn that CO2 emissions from the energy sector went up 4.4% compared to 2010, and 10.8% compared to 1990, as a consequence of shutting down nuclear plants after the Fukushima accident.

Energy consumption went down by 3% compared to 2010, but was still 4.6% over 1990 levels.

Generation of nuclear energy was down by 64.5%. 2011 was not a particularly good year for nuclear energy in Japan </understatement>.

The energy sector in Japan is clearly dominated by oil. A diagram on page 10 shows that Japan got around 9,000 PetaJoule from oil, around 5,000 each from coal and gas. Japan depended to 88.8% on fossil fuel in 2011, up from 82.6% in 2010. It was only able to supply 12.4% (down from 19.1%) domestically, leaving it with a large bill for fossil fuel imports.

There is still a long way to go before renewable energy in Japan will be able to contribute a significant share. The EU goal of 20 percent by 2020 would seem to be rather difficult for Japan to duplicate </understatement>.

 

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Energy Policy Cabinet Decision in Japan

Apr 02 2013 Published by under Japanese energy law

The Japanese Cabinet just adopted a decision on energy policy (in Japanese) reflecting the fact that a consequence of the elections last year the former opposition party LDP is now governing. Thanks to this tweet by Hiro Matsubara for the link.

It doesn’t say much about renewable energy, or nuclear energy. Instead, the central points addressed are about organization of the electricity market.

There it calls mainly for two reforms.

For one, Japan will finally get red of the remaining district monopolies for selling electricity to household consumers. Everybody will be free to sell electricity to everyone. This means that a Japanese company could start to sell only renewable energy, as Lichtblick has in Germany after that market was liberalized fifteen years ago.

The policy paper says that necessary legislation to do this should be done in 2014, with a view of starting the new system in 2016.

However, even after liberalizing the market, price control mechanisms are supposed to stay in place for a certain period of time, until there is enough competition to leave pricing to the market.

The other reform is unbundling. As most other countries have already done, Japan will also go ahead and unbundle the functions of generating and delivering electricity. Operation of the grid will be done by a district monopoly company that may not generate electricity, so as to make sure that there are no conflicts of interest and the grid operator is neutral.

Necessary legislation for doing this is supposed to be enacted in 2015, with a view on taking effect between 2018 and 2020.

This all takes a lot of time for something relatively simple to do. There has been ample experience in Europe with this kind of market reform. So I don’t understand why they want to take so much time.

Anyway, the direction of these reforms is to be applauded, though the speed seems to be rather lacking.

 

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New Japanese Feed-In Tariff Update

Mar 30 2013 Published by under Japanese energy law

Yesterday, the Japanese Ministry of Economy and Industry decided to follow the recommendations of the expert committee I reported on earlier. It’s now official. Small rooftop solar will get 38 yen (around 40.3 cents U.S or 31.5 cents Euro at today’s rates), and everything over 10 kW capacity will get 37.8 yen, including the 5% value added tax (36 yen without tax).

Thanks to this tweet by Hiro Matsubara for the link.

Everything else will get the same rates as last year. There have been no changes from the recommendations of the expert committee.

The decision also sets the surcharge for next year at 0.40 yen a kWh, which works out to about 120 yen (about one euro at today’s rates) a month for the average consumer.

The reason that the surcharges are still so small even when the rates are set much higher as in Germany is simply that Japan has just started out with the deployment of renewable energy. With a very small percentage of the market the surcharges naturally will stay small for some time to come.

Update: Leading Japanese renewable expert Keiichiro Sakurai kindly points out in a comment that the feed-in tariff for rooftop solar is paid only for electricity actually sold to the grid. There is no feed-in tariff for electricity people consume themselves. That of course means that for that part of generated electricity people only profit from reducing their electricity bill. It also means an incentive to reduce self-consumption, since the feed-in tariff is still higher than the electricity price charged by TEPCO (18.89 per kWh for the first 120 kWh per month,  25.19 yen for everything above and under 300 kWh per month, and 29.10 for every kWh above 300 kWh per month).

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New Japanese Feed-In Tariff Rates

Mar 30 2013 Published by under Japanese energy law

This post was first published at Cleantechnica on March 25. I repost it here unchanged, except that I have removed images.

This is also a good occasion to mention this development: Editor of Cleantechnica Zachary Shahan kindly invited me to become a contributor to that site, and I have accepted that. I am honored and pleased to get more readers for my posts.

The Japanese law on feed-in tariffs (partial translation available here) requires that feed-in tariffs are revised for each business year, which starts on April 1 in Japan. That means that the feed-in tariffs for the year from April 1 will be announced by the Minister of Economy and Industry shortly.

The Minister relies on a report of a committee of experts for that decision. I recall having discussed last year’s committee report in quite some detail in May 2012.

This year’s report is found here (in Japanese). It consists of a one-page document pointing out the resulting feed-in tariffs, and a 18-page report explaining the reasons.

The resulting feed-in tariff is lowered by about 10% for solar, and kept at the existing level for everything else. Solar is now down to 38 yen per kWh for systems under 10 kW capacity (rooftop solar), paid for 10 years as until now, and 36 yen per kW for larger systems (excluding tax), or 37.8 yen including the 5% value added tax, paid for 20 years.

I note that larger systems still get about double the feed-in tariff, since they get paid for a period double as long, which still does not make much sense to me.

There was some discussion on this point, but the committee decided on keeping the 10-year period for rooftop solar, with one reason being that the rooftop solar market is recording good installation numbers, so there is no reason to expand the system over 10 years right now (page 4).

The reason for lowering the solar tariffs to the new levels is explained without mentioning the installation record, which has been encouraging for solar. Instead, the committee cites real data on installation costs. They mention on page one of the report that owners of solar installations are required by law to report their costs to the Minister of Economy and Industry, and that they lose their right to get paid feed-in tariffs if they provide false numbers.

For rooftop solar, they also subtract subsidies paid at the national level (20,000 yen per kW) and the local level (34,000 yen per kW) from the cost (page three).

For wind, the report notes that there have only been two wind parks receiving feed-in tariffs under the new law (in force since July last year) in the category of over 20 kW. The reason for that is that wind projects take 4 to 7 years from planning stage, with environmental assessments taking some time. They also note that there are 10 projects that have finished environmental assessment and are in the building stage, and 70 more that are in the stage of environmental assessment, so they expect more wind projects to go online in the future.

Anyway, since there was so little deployment in the initial months, they see no reason to reduce the tariffs for wind, which are at 23.1 yen a kWh more than 2.5 times those of Germany (now at 8.93 cents Euro, and not for a full 20 years).

This clearly shows that solar can be deployed much faster than wind. Even at these very favorable conditions, Japanese wind developers have failed to take advantage of the high feed-in tariffs in place right now.

Small wind at less than 20 kW capacity gets even higher tariffs — they are set at 57.75 yen. But even so, there was zero new capacity deployed under these tariffs until now (page 10). The reason for that is that there needs to be a type approval for safety for these, and makers have not yet made it through the process. At zero deployment, the committee did not see any reason to reduce these rates.

The committee still declines to set up different (higher) tariffs for offshore wind energy, since they say that they still lack the necessary data to understand the cost of that technology correctly (page 11). Therefore, in Japan, offshore still pays the same as onshore wind. That is another point that does not make much sense to me.

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Japanese Feed-in Tariff System Problem

Mar 05 2013 Published by under Japanese energy law

The Japanese Renewable Energy Foundation has published results of a survey of companies building solar projects in Japan, and this article at Yahoo describes them. Thanks to this tweet by Tetsunari Iida for the link.

The Japanese system uses the concept of a contract between the solar owner and the utility, instead an obligation by law (as the German system does). This is a clear failure causing unnecessary costs and delays, and even completely derailing some projects.

As a consequence, many projects are forced to spend up to half a year to negotiate contracts. And some utilities even refuse to buy renewable electricity, with various excuses. This obviously has to change. It is an inefficient way of running things. The conditions for selling under the feed-in tariff need to be set finally by law, and there should be no loopholes and excuses for refusing to buy.

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Good News: Former Prime Minister Kan Building Passive House

Feb 24 2013 Published by under Japanese energy law

Former Prime Minister Naoto Kan just announced on his blog that he has rebuilt the house his mother is living in (where he is moving in as well) so as to produce more energy with solar panels than that house needs. If things proceed according to plan, the house will generate 107% of the energy it needs over solar panels.

More people should do that. Maybe this helps spreading the message.

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Yomiuri Pro-Nuclear Editorial Inventing Facts about Germany

Jan 09 2013 Published by under European and German energy law, Fossil Nukes, Japanese energy law

An English translation of yet another anti-renewable propaganda pro-nuclear Yomiuri editorial was just posted. I am pleased, since I expect any such Fossil Nuke article at Yomiuri to contain multiple easily refuted errors, so I get something to write about.

For one, the most serious error is this:

In Germany, which introduced a similar system before Japan did, power charges for households have doubled as the cost of purchasing renewable energy swelled.

That is rather far away from reality. This is a nice occasion to republish a graph on the real development of energy costs in Germany, first blogged under the title “German Feed-in Tariff Costs Invisible Without Magnifying Glass”. Here it is:

 


The graph shows the energy cost of a three person average household from 2000 to 2012. The uppermost violet part are the surcharges, which have gone from one to ten EUR a month, and average electricity cost have gone from 44 to 75 EUR.

Of course the surcharge costs have risen in 2013 again, which will lead to another 1.70 EUR per household. Let’s call that 2 EUR for 12 EUR a month average. That would leave 77 EUR a month for the average household in 2013, which is of course not “double” of 44 EUR. And of course only a small part of the increase of 33 EUR a month is due to the surcharges. That would be 11 EUR in costs from surcharges, and not 44, as would be necessary to make the Yomiuri fantasy world statement true.

How can anybody working for a major newspaper and writing on its editorial page be so clueless about basic facts?

Of course, no respectable anti-renewable Fossil Nuke article could do without the two talking points of cost and reliability. This article writes:

Electricity produced through renewable energy sources is unstable because it depends on weather conditions, and it is expensive.

Both of these statements are of course wrong. I’ll skip an explanation in this post. I have discussed them in many posts on this blog. Let’s just choose two: “Cost of Solar 0.14% of GDP in Germany” and “The many ways the Unreliables Myth is wrong”.

 

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2012 Weak Wind Capacity Deployment in Japan

Jan 09 2013 Published by under Japanese energy law

The Japanese Wind Energy Association just published figures on wind energy deployment for 2012. They look very weak.

Thanks to this tweet by Hiro Matsubara for the link.

For all of 2012 there was only 92 MW of new capacity installed, distributed over 49 turbines.

With the feed-in tariff law in force since July of last year are paying more than 2.5 times of major markets like Germany (Paul Gipe), this has not yet unleashed a big wind boom on the Japanese market. The Japanese Wind Energy Association points to a revision of the environmental assessment law that has come into force in October 2012 as one reason for this disappointing development.

For comparison, 2006 has seen 406 MW, and 2009 was 304 MW of additional wind capacity in Japan, so these figures are weak not only in comparison to what one would expect with such generous feed-in tariffs, but also compared to previous years without a feed-in tariff system.

I guess the good news is that Japan won’t have to worry about wind capacity driving up the surcharges for the time being.

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Hidetoshi Masunaga on Japanese Election Constitutional Lawsuit

Dec 20 2012 Published by under Japanese energy law, Japanese Law

Those unhappy with the landslide victory of the LDP in the last election on Sunday may get a second chance, if the lawsuits filed by Japanese lawyer Hidetoshi Masunaga are successful. As Japan Times reports in detail, he and many other lawyers are claiming that the election was violating the Constitution and should be declared void, and then repeated.

They claim that in a system with electoral districts, these districts need to be adjusted to population movements so as to make sure that each vote has the same weight, an issue discussed at Wikipedia under the title “malapportionment”.

I am writing about this because Mr. Masunaga yesterday visited Aoyama Gakuin University to talk about these issues to students and faculty. I also had the opportunity to discuss this topic over a dinner after his talk.

At the time I mentioned Lawrence Lessig’s effort to reform voting in the United States (Rootstrikers), which Mr. Masunaga was not familiar with, but seemed interested in. I pointed out that Lessig has an impossible task before him, since if all decisions in Congress are determined by lobby money, the last thing the lobbyists will let pass is any change of that situation, as blogged before in my review of Lessig’s book “One Way Forward”.

I then also asked what exactly was the influence of this problem on the result of the election. Is this something that benefits the LDP? Would solving this problem mean that the next Prime Minister would still be Noda?

His answer was that he doesn’t know, and that I may want to check that myself if I think it is interesting.

Yes, I think this is interesting when discussing this question. Actually, his case depends largely on the answer to this.

I recall that I watched the final of the FIFA Club World Cup at the time the polls were closed on Sunday. Then, after a countdown of the last ten seconds, the large picture of the election results showed up, predicting (correctly) a landslide LDP victory of close to 300 seats.

That was of course done by exit polls, which is asking only a small minority, but the way statistics work the result will be correct also for the whole picture, with a error of margin also very well known.

So, if Mr. Masunaga’s main point only is that the election may be decided by asking only a minority, that minority is still much larger than the sample of a poll. It can still reflect exactly the same result that would have happened with a perfectly adjusted districts landscape.

In contrast, if he can explain exactly how that changed the results of the election, he has a much better case. I would assume he might be interested in that.

Fortunately, for this particular election, any tweaking at the system resulting in a couple of seats more for the DPJ and less for the LDP won’t change anything about the big picture. For the record, the LDP got 294 seats, winning 176 more than it had before the election. The DPJ in contrast was reduced to 57, losing 173 seats, which is the most crushing defeat any ruling party in Japan has ever been dealt.

To turn that around over different districts is simply impossible. There is no need to even start checking. That’s just common sense.

But just for the fun of it, let’s try to check anyway, reducing the analysis only to the contest between LDP and DPJ (this is already too long).

I start out from the fact that LDP won 237 district seats, while the DPJ won only 27.

So let’s check if these 27 wins are biased in any way. Are they all in city districts with many voters, and consequently less weight per vote?

At first sight, that does not seem to be the case at all. In this section of the Japanese Wikipedia article on the election all the district winners are easily checked, and it turns out that the DPJ has wins all over the country.

And checking in more detail, it turns out that the LDP crushed the DPJ in the ten districts with the most voters (and the least weight per vote). They won all of them except Chiba 4, which was carried by outgoing Prime Minister Noda. So there is no way the DPJ could have won if just the district map would have been drawn somewhat else.

That explains why Mr. Masunaga wouldn’t want to know about this. It actually weakens his case if you find out that while in theory one person one vote makes sense, this has been without any measurable influence on the big picture of this particular election.

On the other hand, it does make sense to adjust districts to changes in population. And if the present system is not favorable to one particular party, and especially not favorable to the most powerful LDP, it will be that much easier to actually change the law, which is in stark contrast to Lessig’s fight in the United States.

 

 

 

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