An editor once admonished that one should avoid negatives at the start of a story—readers want to know what the news is, not what it is not. Yet in the case of Japan’s summer electricity “shortage” the story really is what did not happen: The lights did not go out over the past few months.
This is surprising, to some at least, because the country has used next to no nuclear-generated electricity during that span.
The Summer the Lights Stayed On in Tokyo
ReplyDeleteNuclear plants shut down, apocalypse does not ensue. What happens now?
by Joseph Sternberg
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444426404577647020449591102.html
An editor once admonished that one should avoid negatives at the start of a story—readers want to know what the news is, not what it is not. Yet in the case of Japan’s summer electricity “shortage” the story really is what did not happen: The lights did not go out over the past few months.
ReplyDeleteThis is surprising, to some at least, because the country has used next to no nuclear-generated electricity during that span. The public backlash against nukes was so great after last year’s Fukushima disaster that Tokyo found it politically impossible to restart any but two of the country’s reactors after they were taken offline for routine maintenance.
The near-total shutdown was supposed to have been an economic and quality-of-life disaster. The “nuclear village”—a mélange of utilities, manufacturers of nuclear equipment, bureaucrats and pro-nuke politicians with a vested interest in nuclear power and a track record of shaping Japanese energy policy—warned of rolling blackouts.
They noted that before Fukushima, nuclear accounted for nearly one-third of the country’s electricity supply, and that summer demand would likely exceed non-nuclear capacity. Lights would go dim, air conditioners would go off, factories would go dark.
In the event, temperatures were cooler than anticipated and Japanese were better than expected at conserving power—to the embarrassment of the alarmists. Historians may look back at The Summer the Lights Stayed On as the moment the credibility of government energy planners went kablooey. Not a moment too soon.
The biggest sign of this is the debate over whether Japan will continue to use nuclear energy at all. It is increasingly likely that Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda will acquiesce to public demands for a total phase-out by 2030. Before Fukushima, the government-utility complex had planned to increase nuclear generation to half of the total.
The phase-out is proving difficult for the nuclear village to block because the public no longer believes claims that abandoning nukes will lead to calamity. The public was told disaster would strike this summer. Instead, some utilities ended up with power surpluses of up to 10%. Now the same bureaucrats and utilities predict an economic apocalypse if the nukes don’t come back over the next few years. Yeah, right, a skeptical public says.
The more fun question will be what comes after nuclear. Some hints are emerging from the unlikeliest corner: the beleaguered Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, owner of the Fukushima plant.
Tepco and other utilities have been accelerating their roll-out of so-called smart meters to households, sophisticated devices that allow more detailed tracking of consumption and pave the way for innovative pricing, such as charging more for power consumed during peak hours. But first utilities have to buy the high-tech meters. Earlier this year, Tepco announced it had developed unique specs for the smart meters it wanted to install, instead of adopting the technical standards already in use in the U.S. and Europe.
Apparently, the company hoped to steer business to two of its subsidiaries that just happen to produce smart meters in line with its preferred specs. But Tepco’s stock was so low with the public—and this was even before the Summer of Light—that enough of a kerfuffle arose for Tepco’s government masters to conclude in July they should force the utility to adopt international-standard meters instead.
ReplyDeleteAt the time this was heralded, if it was heralded at all, as a victory for cost-effectiveness in Tepco’s own procurement. More intriguing is the prospect that if households are able to plug into the grid with standardized meters instead of proprietary Tepco kit, other utilities might be able to more easily poach those consumers from Tepco if ever the market is sufficiently deregulated. Meanwhile, the smart meters produce a stream of usage data that, in a standardized form, are potentially of great use to non-Tepco generators trying to sell into Tepco’s grid if ever that market is sufficiently deregulated.
It all sounds far-fetched, until one factors in the consequences of the nuclear village’s summer credibility collapse. Tepco President Naomi Hirose has warned in recent weeks that his company faces a rough road if its nuclear plants aren’t allowed back online. The utility is squeezed between astronomical clean-up and compensation costs related to Fukushima, and higher fossil-fuel prices to keep its conventional generators whirring.
Might the government, which effectively nationalized Tepco in July, eventually be forced to break it apart if it stops functioning as a unitary company? Might that in turn pave the way for the break-up of the other vertically integrated, monopolistic utilities? Might such reforms build off of smaller, almost imperceptible steps—like standardized smart meters—that already have resulted from the increasing politicization (as opposed to the old-style technocratization) of energy policy in Japan?
It might, or it might not. But Japan sure wasn’t asking these questions with such urgency and optimism back when the nuclear village still dominated energy policy-making in Tokyo—back before the lights stayed on this summer.