Decarbonising Japan: Challenges and Opportunities for Large-Scale Solar PV
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in November 2020 that the “science is clear”: failure to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030 by half and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 worldwide will be catastrophic. The COVID-19 crisis will “pale in comparison to what the climate crisis holds in store,” Guterres said.
Speaking five years after the Paris Agreement, when a landmark consensus had been reached, the Secretary-General highlighted that the European Union, along with the United Kingdom, Japan and the Republic of Korea and more than 110 other countries had pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and China by 2060.
Since then, US President Joe Biden has brought his country back into the Paris Agreement too.
Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga made that pledge in October, like Biden making climate action one of his first big moves after taking office. Japan has embraced solar energy in the recent and not-so-recent past, initially in the 1970s following the OPEC oil price shock and then again from 2012, following the earthquake and tsunami that hit East Japan in March 2011.
The introduction of the feed-in tariff (FiT) in 2012 for solar PV at all scales with prices set originally in excess of ¥40 (US$0.38) per kW began a solar ‘gold rush’: according to government statistics, a total of 74.3GW of solar was approved under the regime, of which 68% (50.2GW) has been commissioned.
The vast majority of projects below 2MW capacity approved have been built and connected to the grid already, for instance 97% of projects under <10kW — generally residential — have been built and between 70% and 80% of all projects between 10kW to 2MW capacity have been commissioned.
However, for PV plants of 2MW or more, 21.9GW of projects have been approved and only 42% commissioned (9.2GW). Tokyo-headquartered industry analysis firm RTS Corporation believes that much of the remaining 12.7GW is under development, but it is unclear what will definitely be built. So what are some of the challenges still facing large-scale solar PV developers today?
Winning over local stakeholders
It can take a lot of time to develop projects in Japan, Tomomichi Kageyama, representative director at Sonnedix Japan, says. European PV developer Sonnedix has more than 1GW of operational assets worldwide and opened its offices in Tokyo in 2013.
It now has 250MW in operation in Japan. Kageyama says this is due to rapid development in 2020: at the end of 2019, Sonnedix Japan only had 56MW in operation.
Progress last year was partly down to a new strategy of acquiring projects under development. From the early stages, projects took longer than the company had expected, Kageyama says, with a “long, long journey” to obtain permitting…Read More...
