SPIEGEL reports about plans for increasing Norwegian pumped hydro storage in the German market. Norway has excellent hydro resources and could store up to 25 GW from the more southern European grids in times where there is no sufficient demand for renewable peak delivery.
While that comes at a loss of about 20 percent on a round trip, that loss is less than using gas as a storage medium.
There are already a lot of existing power lines connecting Norway with other European countries. And there are also plans for building some new ones.
Japan would not have access to that option. Norway is rather far away.
Fortunately, Japan has excellent mountain resources as well. As Kevin Meyerson just wrote, Japan has enormous resources to store electricity with pumped hydro.
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