Yet, there is danger is desperation. Your national government, for example, is planning to to buy solar power for 53 cents/kWh, and for 20 years. Germany tried this a few years ago, reduced their price by a factor two, and will soon phase this out. For good reason, as this was bankrupting the country. One example: what if your government decided to spend 20 billion to beam solar energy from space for 300,000 homes. Green, yes, but stupid, absolutely, for a natural gas system for the same requirements would only cost a billion dollars.
Clean energy is good, and I've been an advocate all my life. However, there are sensible ways to proceed and truly idiotic pathways. This solar policy is fiscally insane. Again, the Japanese government is placing the burden on the general public, as they will have to foot this bill. There are better ways.
First, electrical production accounts for far less than half a country's energy needs. This is all you're doing because your immediate reaction was to replace the power from nuclear energy as a fallout from Fukushima. Unfortunately, sort of like Germany, Japan has meager sunlight, uneven wind regimes, no ground biomass potential and mostly low temperature geothermal prospects.
Japan's future is the sea around you. My HuffPo posting of about a year ago was entitled:
THE BLUE REVOLUTION IS THE OPTIMAL SOLUTION FOR JAPAN
Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone increases your national territory by a factor of ten:
While your shipbuilding industry has fallen to #3, the infrastructure exists to resurrect the enterprise to world leading status by building grazing OTEC plantships to lead the way to the BLUE REVOLUTION. The International Space Station is more and more becoming known as a 150 billion white elephant, as the focus for the rest of this century should not be space ("that effort became obsolete when the Cold War ended"). The next economic frontier is the ocean, and the adventure of relevance is the Pacific International Ocean Station.
"Granted, there is no reason why you should listen to me. My original HUFFINGTON POST" article urged President Barack Obama to save the world with an ambitious peace plan. I later advised China President Hu Jintao on how best to attain superpower status. Then a message to China's future president, Xi Jinping. All three ignored me. Understandably, for I'm not a peace scholar nor war expert.
However, I do know energy, and especially the renewable options, for I've dedicated my past forty years to this field:
- spent seven years in the biomass industry as a process engineer;
- taught college energy course as a professor of engineering;
- helped draft original U.S. Senate legislation on ocean energy, wind energy and hydrogen, all which became law;
- personally conducted R
- directed the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute at the University of Hawaii for 15 years;
- co-founded the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research to transfer university research on sustainable resources to the marketplace; and
- served on a couple industrial boards.
With a name like Takahashi, instead of being from Hawaii, why am I not a Japanese citizen?. Well, my father's father was sent away to America in the late 1800's, and on his way back to Hokkaido, stopped on the Island of Kauai to help build a 3 MW hydroelectric power plant. Unfortunately, he fell and died at the site three months before commissioning after my father was born. Interesting that more than a century later, this same facility is still producing 3 MW of electricity. So I do have deep roots in renewable energy.
I've been in Japan more than a hundred times, and am posting this article from the Tokyo Westin. While I leave for Seoul in a couple of days, I'll be back in Osaka at the St Regis at just about the same time as Super Typhoon Gochul:
is currently scheduled to strike Kansai. Then, if I survive, I fly to Busan for the Yeosu World Ocean Expo.
I'D LOVE TO MEET WITH YOU OR A DESIGNATED STAFF MEMBER TO DISCUSS MUTUAL OPPORTUNITIES.
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