Wind Energy Programme in Japan

Abstract

After the accident of nuclear power plant at Fukushima in 2011, Japan’s energy policy has changed to make positive efforts to introduce renewable energies. As for wind power, The Ministry of Environment (MOE) and the METI have tried to shorten the EIA process period to within two years. And MOE started new subsidies supporting 50% cost for pre-EIA investigation and it was applied for about 20 sites in FY 2014. Most of Japanese wind resources exist in the northern rural regions. The METI had started to build new grid lines for wind power at northern rural area in Hokkaido and Akita. At the end of 2017, wind power capacity of 3400 MW had been installed. It produced about 5000 GWh which is 0.56% of the total power supply in 2017. It includes 64.6 MW of offshore wind power of both fixed type and floating type. Especially, the world’s biggest class floating type 7 MW wind turbine has started operation in summer 2015, and One Hitachi’s 5 MW floating wind turbine started operation in May 2017 at Fukushima FORWARD project. Then, in July 2019, Japanese government officially announced that four areas of sea in first phase and seven areas of sea around Japan for proceeding to develop on offshore wind power generation. The total wind power output will be 7GW, thus total installation of wind power will be 10GW until mid 2020’s.