Revisiting Japanese energy saving

I first visited Japan a few months after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. I returned for another few weeks in 2019.

During my first trip, the Japanese were still very much in the grip of recovering from the earthquake, tsunami and the resultant disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. All of Japan's reactors, which produced 25% of their electricity, were shut down indefinitely. These plants almost produced a large proportion of the total energy consumed in buildings, when considering that natural gas is rarely used: for the vast majority of the population, air conditioning is ubiquitous and the need for heating rare.

The disaster had a major impact on Japan.

Firstly, despite being blessed with one seemingly inexhaustible resource, its stoic and respectful people, Japan isn't blessed with mineral resources, including natural gas, coal or oil, which all has to be imported. Given its distance from gas sources like Russia and Australia, that means expensive liquid natural gas (LNG). Equally, it isn't interconnected with other countries power grid. Indeed, it doesn't even have a single frequency national grid.

These imported sources of fuel, from coal, gas and oil, grew from 63% of power produced in the year before the disaster, to 86% the year after it.

Secondly, power production dropped by 7% over this period. These aren't deseasonalised figures, although Japan's climate is relatively stable. Some of this drop would have been the result of disruptions to industrial output, and to a lesser extent the Shinkansen bullet trains (the one I'm writing this from claims to have a rating of 17MW!)

Many advanced high income countries evidence a glide path in power consumption, in line with more efficient appliances and initiatives to reduce building emissions. But what I witnessed on my 2011 trip was widespread publicity about conserving energy in the national interest. Everywhere I went there were prominent government posters (which people avidly read). The same logo-bearing signs appeared in shops, hotel rooms and on the TV.

The real sign of success, in a nation that seemingly adores bright signage, were the dimmed or extinguished lights in Tokyo's Shinjuku district, often cited as the inspiration for the vivid outdoor scenes in Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner.

So what about in 2019? Since my visit, official stats suggest that annual electricity consumption - and given the lack of interconnectors: production - has been relatively static since the Tōhoku crisis. I don't know what has happened to pricing, or economic output, so it's hard to know what effect those factors played. 

Were there any signs visible to me? Not really. The incredible volume of shops were startlingly lit; escalators (which admittedly have long duty cycles) didn't have occupancy sensors; profligate exterior lighting was everywhere you looked. Sure, hotels and many shops were fitted with LED lamps, but no more so than Europe.

Japan must surely wear the crown for the most vending machines per square foot and per capita. There are typically two or more on every train platform, and I'd say you pass at least one every hundred yards in the city. Aside from some signs suggesting that the fake bottles and cans were lit with LED lighting - see examples below, there were as many as ever.

Lighting isn't really the point with these guzzlers, which are cooling single use plastic bottles whilst baking in temperatures of up to 40°. (Did I use them? Of course - Pocari Sweat is my favourite!) It's like saying that your fill up your five litre Range Rover with unleaded.

Still, it's a wonderful county that has given us many efficiency advances, from the Prius and - admittedly often oversized! - OLED TVs, to high speed rail.

UPDATE

I have translated some of the vending machine signs. One of the symbols represents Peak Shifting, which is where the fridges would participate in a Demand Side Response (DSR) scheme to turn off momentarily during peak demand, likely early afternoon in hot Japan. Given the thousands of presumably well insulated fridges, which appeared to have mobile antennae, there would be considerable scope to reduce the need for peaking gas backup to fulfill peak demand. I saw some large solar in Japan (including a few grid-scale farms), but even with the growth in solar since 2011, it is still only a few percent of production.

Another symbol was for Heat Pump. That sounds great on the face of it, as we think of even air source heat pumps being quite efficient. But consider that refrigerators are by definition all heat pumps. Plus the point on whether so many, sometimes lightly-used, brand-fragmented, vending machines are needed in the first place.