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Potential for growth in Japan’s solar industry

Key Japanese takeaways from PV Expo, Japan solar
Panasonic is hoping its new home energy management system products will educate consumers and their families on energy use, in turn driving wider social acceptance of the technologies and their uses. PV Tech Andy Colthorpe. 5 Mar 15 

As regular readers of the site will have seen already, PV Tech was at Tokyo’s PV Expo last week. Japan has been relatively ambitious with regards to solar for many years, even ahead of the introduction of the feed-in tariff (FiT) in July 2012. Thin-film manufacturer turned vertically integrated solar services provider Solar Frontier, for instance, was established as a subsidiary of petrochemical company Showa Shell in response to the OPEC oil price shock of the 1970s.

The boom that came with the introduction of the feed-in tariff (FiT), however, turned this primary focus on R&D into the development of enough gigawatts of utility-scale PV to put Japan in the top two or three solar nations on the planet in terms of deployment.

Much has been made of the grid connection and land shortage issues now facing utility-scale solar in particular, not least by PV Tech. There is an understanding that once the currently existing pipeline of projects is deployed, Japanese utility-scale PV, or megasolar as it is known in the country, will cease to go ahead in any significant numbers. That said, the pipeline stands at more than 50GW, which is a lot of solar in anyone’s book. Project investment and project rights trading are keeping the megasolar sector busy along with actual construction and design activities.

Beyond that, of course, it will be all about the diversification of the maturing industry, whether Japan’s commercial rooftop sector will pick up where megasolar left off, and whether Japanese households will keep installing their own systems. The former remains to be seen, while the forthcoming energy market deregulation process and the activities of both solar energy services companies and their partners in the house construction industry could drive the latter to new heights……http://www.pv-tech.org/editors_blog/key_japanese_takeaways_from_pv_expo_tokyo

March 6, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, renewable