Japan renewable energy facilities came online at nearly four times the pace of last year for the first two months of the fiscal year beginning in April 2013.
According to the much delayed report released by Japan’s METI a few days ago, renewable energy facilities came online at a far accelerated pace compared to the previous year. In the April 2012 to March 2013 period just over 2GW of new renewable energy power generation facilities came online. In the two month period of April-May 2013 alone, Japan added approximately 1.3GW of additional facilities which is nearly 4X the pace of the previous year on a per month basis.
New facilities are coming online at accelerated rates in Japan.
This accelerated pace of adoption is apparently the basis for the prediction of approximately 6 to 9 GW of new generation facilities to come online for the current fiscal year.
As noted in my previous post, Japan also approved a huge amount of new renewable energy facilities to the tune of 26+ nuclear reactors worth of power generation. Japan based analyst Dr. Gerhard Fasol noted that new approvals appear to be slowing down. Personally, I am a bit wary of making any judgement at this point. There is a huge backlog of approved projects in the pipeline, and cautious Japanese investors are most likely evaluating the new (and still very generous) feed-in tariff rates that were introduced for solar power as of April this year. More information will need to be released before any judgement can be made whether or not Japan’s renewable boom is here to stay.
More information is available regarding the recent report in Japanese at the METI website.
KMB48 