Despite a vast increase in generation, difficulties in integrating renewable energy to Japan’s electricity networks shows that the country’s utilities are still “at the very first stage” of learning to do so, the director of the Japan Renewable Energy Foundation (JREF) has said. Mika Ohbayashi, director of the advocacy group, told PV Tech on Friday that JREF welcomed the publication this week of a newspaper survey showing that solar contributed 10% of peak electricity demand in Japan during summer. Ohbayashi said it was a positive development that the newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, conducted the survey for which it wrote to and received replies from nine out of 10 of Japan’s regional electric power utilities – which are also responsible for operating the grid in their respective regions. One utility, Kyushu Electric Power, based on Kyushu, south of the main Japanese island of Honshu, covered as much as 24.6% of electricity demand during the lunchtime of 6 August with PV, amounting to around 3.65GW. During spring, Kyushu also covered around half of its total demand with solar. “I think it’s really good… the newspaper is now aware that renewables can contribute to peak demand. Especially that Asahi’s article found that 10% of peak demand is covered by PV, which is a big number,” Ohbayashi said. “At the same time, the comments from the industry like power companies such as Shikoku and Kyushu, they say they have difficulties to deal with the stability of the power generation of renewables.” Ohbayashi said her first impressions of the news story, and of comments from power companies, showed that in several cases, the utilities lacked up-to-date technology and that the measures taken for renewable energy integration are still “not appropriate” to Japan’s drive to greatly increase deployment. “My impression of Shikoku’s remarks that they have some difficulties for the stabilisation of the grid because of the unstable generation by PV, it just gives me the impression that they don’t have [adequate] technologies to make it stable… that’s a very old fashioned type of comment.” “That shows that Japan’s utilities are still at the very first stage to introduce renewables because they haven’t caught up to advanced technologies.” Nonetheless, Ohbayashi said, JREF still sees a “huge potential” for renewables – if certain conditions can be met. These include a successful reform of Japan’s electricity market, a process which is now underway, with the appointment of a regulator or watchdog to oversee the first major stage of that process – enabling interconnection between the various regional grid networks and the utilities that run them. Since the introduction of the feed-in tariff (FiT) in Japan in July 2012, Japan has become one of the biggest markets for solar energy in the world. However, there have been recent high profile challenges to the rise of renewables, including various problems cited with grid integration and rises in consumer electricity bills. Nonetheless, by the end of April this year, around 24GW of PV had been installed under the FiT, according to government statistics. Various experts and industry figures, including Canadian Solar’s CEO Shawn Qu, have said that the reform process which is meant to separate utilities from the grid operating roles and allow for greater competition and consumer choice in the retail electricity market could also revitalise Japan’s solar sector and allow for much greater levels of deployment and integration. The second and third stages of the reform process involve introducing full market competition, where consumers will be able to choose their electricity supplier, followed by a full “unbundling”, with final stage of deregulation set to begin in April 2020. Additionally, Ohbayashi said, studies of better weather forecasting and how to use forecasting to help predict the output of renewables are starting to be integrated into the process, which will take “about three years”, the JREF director predicted. It could also be extremely expensive, according to Ohbayashi. Ohbayashi expressed some frustration that the market reform could take several years to implement in full, and said that Japan was lagging behind other regions of the world, such as Northern Europe and in particular Germany in its efforts to implement new technologies at grid level and market reform to allow for more renewables. However, she said, the recent Asahi Shimbun survey showed the great promise of clean energy. “They [utilities] do not use…regional interconnection transmission trade for controlling [the dispatch of] those renewables, but still renewables can provide 50% of electricity in [some] areas. It shows the big potential of renewables to provide a huge amount of electricity for the whole of Japan, if the regional interconnection will be advanced or the new technologies such as weather forecasting and market integration will be introduced,” Ohabayashi said. “So I think there still could be a very big potential and a hope for renewables.”
The director of the Japan Renewable Energy Foundation ( JREF ) , Mika Suzuki , said that the country 's utility companies are still at the early stages of learning how to integrate renewable energy , given the difficulties they have in integrating it into Japan 's electricity grid . Ohbayashi said that surveys showed during this summer that solar energy only contributed towards 10 % of the country 's electricity during peak demand . Despite Japan 's current problems , Suzuki explains that reform is on its way following the appointment of a regulator , which will oversee the interconnection between the regional grid networks and the utilities that run them themselves .