Abstract
On 11 March 2011, the earthquake and tsunami caused massive casualties and severe damage to properties, including the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. This chapter discusses the impact of the nuclear accident on Japanese energy and climate policies. Section 10.1 focuses on the impact on the future of Japan’s energy sector. The earlier subsections discuss the impact on the energy and power system, and point out the importance of Demand Activation. The later subsections evaluate potential pathways for power supply and demand of Japan up to 2030. The authors conclude that, although the existing national energy plans of Japan should be reviewed from scratch, it is unlikely and unrealistic to withdraw from nuclear generation in a short time. In Sect. 10.2, the first part discusses the implementation of Japan’s Kyoto target. The second part discusses Japan’s mid-term target of 25% reduction in 2020. The authors argue that, because the nuclear accident was caused by a natural disaster and because it became virtually infeasible for Japan to achieve its mid-term target, Japan must revise the target based on the new mid-term energy policy being reviewed currently.
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Notes
- 1.
The decentralized energy management system for a house is called Home Energy Management System.
- 2.
Centralized Energy management is done by a load dispatch center by a vertically integrated utility in a regulated environment as in Japan, or by a market and a Transmission System Operator in a deregulated environment as in Europe and the USA.
- 3.
Additional cost to the economy due to the introduction of the FIT (namely subsidies to renewable generators) is not calculated in this section because of the uncertainty of purchasing prices (tariffs) of different technologies, declining curves of prices that reflect technology improvement, and the period of the duration of the system itself.
- 4.
It should be noted that power demand even in scenario 1 is based on the assumption that almost all available technologies will be introduced, although not compulsorily. This means that the demand prospect itself up to 2030 is rather challenging.
- 5.
The LOLP of a power system is the probability during a given period that demand will exceed the generating capacity.
- 6.
The EUE is a measure of expected energy amount which a power system fails to supply when demand exceeds the generating capacity.
- 7.
The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission defines the ancillary services as “those services necessary to support the transmission of electric power from seller to purchaser given the obligations of control areas and transmitting utilities within those control areas to maintain reliable operations of the interconnected transmission system,” and identifies six different kinds of ancillary services, i.e., scheduling and dispatch, reactive power and voltage control, loss compensation, load following, system protection, and energy imbalance.
- 8.
IEEJ (2011) also showed that the imported fuel cost of fossil fuel power generation in 2012, even without taking the rising price of fossil fuel due to massive purchase by Japan into consideration, will be 3.5 trillion yen (around $46 billion). This will be equivalent to an electricity price of 3.7 yen/kWh, which corresponds to increases of 18% and 36% for household and industry. The industrial sector may suffer serious setbacks to its competitiveness.
- 9.
As to the economic instrument, after serious discussions by government committees, Japan decided not to introduce this now, except for voluntary emissions trading.
- 10.
Just for the reader’s reference, the author would like to show that marginal abatement costs (MAC) to comply with the Kyoto target. According to the table that shows the outcome of the Energy Modeling Forum in the IPCC third assessment report (2001, p. 56), the MAC for the USA, OECD Europe, and Japan with no emissions trading are $76–410, $20–966, and $97–1,074 per ton of carbon (not CO2), respectively. If we take the mean value of the MAC from 11 models where comparison of these three regions is possible, they are $188, $218, and $357 for the USA, OECD Europe, and Japan. From the above, it is clear that Japan’s target is among the most challenging (IPCC 2001, p. 56).
- 11.
These figures are based on the premise that the generating capacity of PV and wind power will respectively increase to 28 GW and 10.6 GW by 2020. However, these figures (i.e., 7.8 times for PV and 4.4 times for wind relative to those in 2010) are very challenging, and failing to achieve these figures may lead to an additional increase of CO2 emissions.
- 12.
It was regrettable that then Prime Minister Mr. Naoto Kan lost the best opportunity to do so at the Deauville G8 Summit meetings in May 2011.
- 13.
This target was based on discussions of the government committee on the mid-term target. Even in this case, the carbon price (which is equal to MAC) calculated by modeling experts was around $150/tCO2, which was assumed to be the highest among developed countries. Only three months after Mr. Aso’s decision, Mr. Hatoyama overturned the target and declared a 25% reduction without having any specific measures for compliance.
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Ogimoto, K., Yamaguchi, M. (2012). Nuclear Accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, and Its Impact on Japanese Energy and Climate Policy. In: Yamaguchi, M. (eds) Climate Change Mitigation. Lecture Notes in Energy, vol 4. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4228-7_10
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