Uilities "stalled in an age of incandescent bulbs"

November 17, 2014

COMMENTARY: In age of LEDs, utilities thinking in incandescent-bulb mode

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/views/column/AJ201411170001

By TOSHIHIDE UEDA/ Senior Staff Writer

MIYAKO, Iwate Prefecture--One recent weekend took me to this northeastern city on the Sanriku coast.

In the Seatopia Naado roadside rest area that faces a port in Miyako, I saw light-emitting diodes illuminating a ground floor shop that sells local products.

The two-story facility, severely damaged by the towering tsunami generated by the Great East Japan Earthquake, reopened in July 2013 following total reconstruction. “Naado” means “What about ...” in the local dialect, I was told.

The quake and tsunami of March 2011 took a toll on many power plants and transmission facilities, causing blackouts in nearly all areas affected by the disasters. People were forced to respond to the unprecedented calamity, which was complicated further by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, in total darkness.

Having learned a lesson from that experience, the Iwate prefectural government is pushing to install facilities using renewable energy sources at regional disaster management bases, such as government offices, schools, hospitals and evacuation shelters, so that those establishments can cover their electricity needs on their own.

In the aftermath of the 2011 disasters, the city of Miyako weighed the option of introducing solar power whenever it builds public facilities.

One pillar of the “master plan on renewable energy sources,” which the city government worked out last year, is “enhancing the energy self-sufficiency rate and realizing local production (of energy) for local consumption.”

The Naado rest area also had solar panels installed on its rooftop and LED lighting introduced during the overall repairs.

As I drove north from the port and entered the Taro district of Miyako, I was greeted by a string of streetlamp-like objects with compact solar panels along National Route No. 45.

The “escape route guide lamps,” as the objects are called, are designed to store solar power in their rechargeable batteries and emit light to indicate escape routes even at night. They were installed by the land ministry before the quake and tsunami and were not damaged in the disasters, officials said.

The city plans to increase the number of similar guide lamps and guide signs as part of its post-disaster rebuilding efforts.

“We plan to install light-emitting signs that lead people to move to higher ground, without their knowing it, as they follow the string of lights,” said an official in the city government’s crisis management division. “We will not install products that use commercial power sources (provided by utilities). A quest for compact products with modest power consumption would naturally single out LED lighting as the solution.”

A combination of solar panels, rechargeable batteries and LED lighting is helping a disaster-hit community that seeks “local energy production for local energy consumption.”

'GREAT PROMISE' OF LEDS

The announcement of Nobel Prize winners never leaves me unexcited.

That was particularly true this year, when the physics prize was awarded jointly to Isamu Akasaki, a professor with Meijo University, Hiroshi Amano, a professor with Nagoya University, and Shuji Nakamura, a Japanese-born professor with the University of California at Santa Barbara, for developing blue LEDs and bringing them to practical application.

“Using blue LEDs, white light can be created in a new way” (white LEDs), the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in explaining the selection. “The LED lamp holds great promise for increasing the quality of life for over 1.5 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity grids; due to low power requirements, it can be powered by cheap local solar power.”

In fact, the blue LEDs constitute a groundbreaking invention that answers the call of the times to preserve the Earth’s environment. They already provide more than six times the light intensity per watt of power consumed by incandescent bulbs. They made it possible to provide access to minimum light required for daily lives even in the absence of large power generating facilities.

Power supply is currently available everywhere in Japan.

I wrote in an Asahi Shimbun column in September 2013 about Taimagura village in Miyako, which was the last to gain access to electricity on Dec. 27, 1988, at the height of Japan’s asset-inflated economic growth. One theory says Taimagura means a “path leading into deep woods” in the Ainu language.

A practicable incandescent light bulb was invented in 1879 by U.S. master inventor Thomas Edison. The process of modernization since that time has also been a history of electrification.

Building power plants and power transmission facilities represented a major goal of Japan’s modernization. And the longtime dream of making power supply available to everybody in the country was achieved 26 years ago in a mountain village in Miyako.

But the power plants and power transmission facilities, which we have taken more than a century to build, are so vulnerable to the workings of nature. The LED lighting, which ended an age of incandescent bulbs, also provides a “great promise for increasing the quality of life” for people in this country.

UTILITIES LAG IN INNOVATION

Japan had 54 nuclear reactors before the quake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster. All of them are idled now, but there are still no power blackouts.

Figures on the supply and demand of power for this past summer were presented Oct. 1 to a subcommittee of the Advisory Committee for Natural Resources and Energy, a central government panel on energy policy. The peak demand figures relative to pre-disaster levels in 2010 were down 17.0 percent for Tokyo Electric Power Co., down 13.8 percent for Kansai Electric Power Co., down 9.5 percent for Chubu Electric Power Co. and down 8.4 percent for Tohoku Electric Power Co.

Both corporate and household users are saving on their power use.

Power-saving awareness is taking root among the people, and LED lighting is pushing that trend. Disaster-hit communities are eagerly working to realize distributed energy sources. In addition, the population is waning.

But power utilities are stalled in an age of incandescent bulbs.

Five regional utilities--Kyushu Electric Power Co., Tohoku Electric, Hokkaido Electric Power Co., Shikoku Electric Power Co. and Okinawa Electric Power Co.--have said successively, from the end of September, that they are no longer accepting new contracts to purchase power generated from renewable energy sources under Japan’s feed-in tariff system.

Nobuaki Abe, an executive vice president with Tohoku Electric, cited concerns that the supply potential could far exceed demand. The utilities, however, continue to seek restarts of their nuclear reactors, with the exception of Okinawa Electric, which has no nuclear reactor.

They continue to bank on gigantic contraptions, which the nuclear reactors are, in this age of waning power demand. One could only guess if they missed an opportunity for technical innovation to keep abreast of the times, or if they are simply not interested in keeping abreast.

That represents a problem, in any case.

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