The draft of the government’s new Basic Energy Plan,
compiled by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry for Cabinet approval
this summer, calls for long-term efforts to make renewable energies such as
solar and wind power a “major source of power supply” as the nation pursues the
transition to a post-carbon economy envisioned under the 2015 Paris agreement
to combat climate change. But it falls short of setting new targets for
boosting the share of renewable sources in the nation’s electricity generation
— as the 2030 energy mix targets that accompanied the current energy plan set
in 2014 are kept unchanged.
In fact, the new plan keeps much of the substance of the
current plan intact — and fails to send a clear-cut message as to whether or
how the government wants to change the nation’s energy supply structure. Still,
it lays out the agenda for what’s needed to expand power generation through
renewable sources — in which Japan still lags far behind many other
industrialized economies. The sharp increase in solar and wind power in recent
years has been subsidized under the feed-in tariff (FIT) system introduced in
2012 to buy electricity generated by renewable sources at pre-determined
advantageous prices in order to promote its use — whose cost is added on to
consumers’ electricity bills.
The plan calls for turning renewable energy into
“economically independent” sources of power that can compete with other sources
without relying on a subsidy program, as well as developing technology to
stabilize power supply from renewable sources against changing weather
conditions. To realize the idea of renewables as a major source of power, the
basic plan should be followed up by more concrete programs to put this agenda
into actual policy steps.
Updated roughly every three years since the first plan was
set in 2003, the government’s Basic Energy Plan sets the guideline on the
nation’s medium- to long-term energy policy. The current plan adopted in 2014 —
the first one after the March 2011 nuclear disaster changed the nation’s energy
landscape — called for reducing dependency on nuclear energy “as much as
possible” as well as maximum efforts to increase power generation through
renewable sources.
At the same time, nuclear power was positioned as an
important baseload source of power supply, and the government has promoted the
restart of reactors idled in the wake of the nuclear disaster once they clear
the safety screening of the Nuclear Regulation Authority. However, only eight
reactors have so far been reactivated — well below the roughly 30 reactors that
would be needed for nuclear energy to account for 20 to 22 percent of the power
supply by 2030.
The energy mix target dictates that renewable energy will
supply 22 to 24 percent of the nation’s power demand in 2030. The introduction
of the FIT system in 2012 has boosted the number of solar power generation
business operators in particular. However, the total share of renewable sources
in the power supply, including large-scale hydro power, remains around 15
percent today — well below the global average of about 24 percent. While the
share of renewable energy has increased worldwide as its cost declined, the
per-unit cost of solar and wind power in Japan remains about double the global
average. And the increase in renewable energy here remains subsidized under the
FIT system, placing a large burden on the public each year.
The obvious challenge for turning renewable energy into a
major source of power supply will be to transform it into a competitive
business even without the support of the FIT system. Also important for
expanding the use of renewable energy will be a more efficient use of the power
transmission system, which is owned by major power companies that used to
monopolize regional markets. A ruling Liberal Democratic Party committee on
expanding renewable energy use, in its recent proposal for raising the
government’s target for renewables, said the major power companies should take
the lead in generating power through renewable sources. The government and the
power industry should keep exploring concrete steps to increase the use of
renewable energy in Japan.
A problem with the draft energy plan is that it touts the
importance of transition to a post-carbon economy in the fight against global
warming while viewing coal-fired thermal power plants as a key source of power
supply over the long term. The plan calls for a phaseout of “inefficient” coal
plants to be replaced by highly efficient ones. But even these are believed to
emit twice as much carbon dioxide as natural gas-fired thermal power plants.
The 2030 energy mix target of coal accounting for 26 percent of the nation’s
power supply remains intact. This should be reviewed.
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