Renewables targeted before Fukushima
My and Jessica Jewell's recent letter to Nature responds to a publication by a group of public policy scholars who claim that Japan turned to renewable energy only after the nuclear disaster of 2011. We set the record straight by comparing the pre-Fukushima Basic Energy Plan prepared in 2010 to the post-Fukushima Strategic Energy Plan prepared in 2014. The 2010 plan envisioned 21% of renewables in the electricity mix in 2030, virtually identical to 23% in the 2014 plan. Though Fukushima had a marginal effect on Japan's plans for renewables it did result in the cancellation of the nuclear power plans and a boost for coal (as we wrote earlier).
Our simple observation implies both good and bad news for renewable electricity. The good news is that there is no need to wait for a nuclear disaster to develop renewables. Japan started its pioneering Sunshine Project in 1974 and by the early 2000s was the world leader in solar PV technology, manufacturing, and policy (according to a 2002 Lawrence Berkley's National Laboratory report to the US Government). The bad news is that the expansion of renewables does not magically come following a big nuclear accident. Enormous multi-decade government RD&D expenditures and multiple support policies did not make Japan a leader in renewable electricity production either before or after Fukushima. Part of the problem might be its geography that does not favor onshore wind power, another part may be the sheer size and complexity of the energy challenges of the isolated electricity system which had to almost triple in size between 1970 and 2010.
Our letter also highlights an often-overlooked aspect of electricity transitions, namely that states pressed for energy security often pursue new (niche) technologies alongside supporting existing (incumbent) ones. Yoshihiro Hamakawa, one of the creators of the modern solar PV technology, summarised the rationale for Sunshine Project (which he helped to initiated) in a 1979 article:
annual energy demand growth rate of about 10% makes [Japan] among the most vulnerable countries; [...] the purpose of the Sunshine Project is to alleviate the expected energy crisis through the efficient utilisation of solar energy.
The Sunshine project and its successors such as the Alternative Energy Act of 1980 were significant for the global development of solar power, but they also targeted other technologies: hydrogen, geothermal and coal-to-liquids (which had the largest share of funding). This was in parallel to strong support for the expansion of nuclear energy and acquiring fossil assets overseas by Japanese corporations. In the same period, Germany, supported research in solar and wind in parallel with a similarly massive nuclear expansion and some of the world's largest coal subsidies. This is not a paradox: niche and incumbent support policies do not need to clash as long as a niche remains merely a niche (or as long as an 'energy crisis' is on the horizon).