Spokane7
68°
March 27, 2011 in Nation/World
Japan wrestles with energy crisis
TOKYO – The first pitch of Japan’s baseball season has been pushed back so that people don’t waste gasoline driving to games. When the season does start, most night games will be switched to daytime so as not to squander electricity. There’ll be no extra innings.
Tokyo’s iconic electronic billboards have been switched off. Trash is piling up in many northern Japanese cities because garbage trucks don’t have gasoline. Public buildings go unheated. Factories are closed, in large part because of rolling blackouts and because employees can’t drive to work with empty tanks.
This is what happens when a 21st-century country runs critically low on energy. The March 11 earthquake and tsunami have thrust much of Japan into an unaccustomed dark age that could drag on for up to a year.
“It is dark enough to be a little scary. … To my generation, it is unthinkable to have a shortage of electricity,” said Naoki Takano, a 25-year-old pony-tailed salesman at Tower Records in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, in normal times infused by pulsing neon lights.
The store has switched off its elevators and the big screen out front that used to play music videos late into the night, a situation that Takano expects to last until summer.
Two-pronged problem
Japan’s energy crisis is taking place on two fronts: The explosions at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear compound and the shutdown of other nuclear plants owned by Tokyo Electric Power Co. have reduced the supply of electricity to the capital by nearly 30 percent.
Nine oil refineries also were damaged, including one in Chiba, near Tokyo, which burned spectacularly on television, creating shortages of gasoline and heating oil. Gasoline lines in the northern part of Honshu, Japan’s main island, extend for miles. About 30 percent of the gas stations in the Tokyo area are closed because they have nothing to sell.
Economists say it is difficult to parse out how much is the result of actual scarcity and how much comes from hoarding.
“We are close to getting back to the gasoline capacity we had before the earthquake, but we are hearing demand has been two- to threefold the normal volume,” said Takashi Kono of the policy planning division in the natural resources and fuel department at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. “With that much demand, of course we’re looking at a shortage.”
The U.S. military has allocated up to 250,000 gallons of gasoline and 250,000 gallons of diesel for use in the relief operation.
Energy analysts expect the gasoline crisis to ease in the coming weeks as supply lines reopen and panic buying subsides. The electricity shortage, however, is likely to linger for months and might get worse as the weather warms up and people try to turn on their air conditioners.
Tokyo’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper on Tuesday quoted an unnamed senior official of Tokyo Electric, which serves 28 million customers, as saying rolling blackouts could last a year.
Electricity is the talk of the town. Newspaper readers pore over detailed schedules of the rolling blackouts printed on the back pages. Many movie theaters are closed, companies have switched off unnecessary lights and advertising, restricted use of elevators and shortened working hours.
Lack of supplies
For now, gasoline shortages are disrupting both daily life and relief efforts.
In Akita, a city 280 miles north of Tokyo, the few gas stations that are open have lines extending as long as a mile and limit purchases to 4 gallons. It would hardly be worth the wait, except that people want gas for emergencies – for example, if they need to flee radiation from the crippled nuclear plant.
The lack of gasoline for the delivery trucks has aggravated shortages of key products, especially milk, bread, batteries, toilet paper and mineral water.
“You can’t buy anything, you can’t go anywhere, you can’t do anything. We’re basically hanging out at home,” said Megumi Fukatsu, an accounting student in Akita.
Some of those left homeless by the quake and tsunami still have cars but can’t use them, while relatives who would otherwise rescue them don’t have the gas to reach the coastal areas. People trying to flee the nuclear plant in Fukushima weren’t able to do so because their gas tanks were empty.
Around Japan, a sympathetic public has been energized to help out earthquake victims with collections of clothing, blankets and food. But it has no way of getting the aid to victims.
“Everybody is willing to donate. How we will drive this stuff to the coast, I don’t know,” said Noriyuki Miyakwa, a 19-year-old from Akita who was stuffing thick, fuzzy sweaters into cartons at a community center.
A spur for efficiency
The electricity shortage will be harder to fix.
Besides the damage to the nuclear reactors, two thermal power plants were knocked out by the earthquake. And the energy grid in Japan is split in two, a peculiarity that means the energy-starved north cannot borrow from the south.
On the baseball diamond, Japan’s Pacific League, which has a team in Sendai near the quake epicenter, has pushed back its season opener until April 12 to allow for rebuilding and energy conservation. The Central League has delayed its opener by only four days, until Tuesday. Both agreed to avoid night games and extra innings.
If there is a silver lining to the crisis, energy analysts say, it will be an awakening in Japan about energy efficiency and conservation.
“It is going to be a different world,” said David Von Hippel, an energy analyst with the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, a think tank. He predicts that the catastrophic nuclear accident at Fukushima will turn Japanese public opinion against nuclear power and force the nation to look more closely at energy efficiency. “They’d done a very good job at improving efficiency in the first two oil shocks in 1974 and 1979, but since 2000, the curve has been pretty flat.”
With energy twice as expensive as in the United States, Japan is a world leader in energy-efficient appliances, but homes here are often poorly insulated and bright lights are kept on late into the night for advertising. “You see these all-night vending machines lit up 24/7,” Von Hippel said.
Yoko Ogata, 68, of Akita, said that young Japanese will have to take a cue from the generation that remembers the deprivation after World War II.
“The young people take it all for granted. They don’t know how to cope with shortages the way that we do,” Ogata said.
The scope of the disaster does appear to be motivating the younger generation to take action. Students at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo organized a campaign for earlier bedtimes to save electricity.
“Lights out at 9 p.m.!” wrote the students on Mixi, Japan’s most popular social networking site. If “I go to bed three hours early, and I did this for a week, that means I would have saved 21 hours – almost a full day of electricity – and I can pass that energy on.”
Stocks plummet as outlook in Europe dims 
RedCedar on March 27 at 1:31 p.m.
“To my generation, it is unthinkable to have a shortage of electricity,”
Yes, indeed. To his generation, in Japan, in the US, in Europe, and increasingly everywhere in the world, it’s unthinkable not to have everything they want when they want it. Politically, they want all the modern conveniences of iphones, fast and comfortable cars, a starbucks on every block, good cheap food available everywhere, enjoyable work that lets them fly off for eco-touring in some distance World Heritage Site, a great variety of entertainment, AND they want a pristine environment with no pollution, nothing ugly built anywhere, no competition for resources, no hard work, no conflict, and when it comes to energy, it all runs on electricity that just magically appears at the outlet. If someone threatens to manufacture electricity by doing anything environmentally destructive, they rally against it.
When you question their reasoning, they say “conservation and green energy”. Over the past 30 years we’ve done a lot to improve efficiency of houses and industry. Ordinary furnaces have gone from maybe 60% to 90%. Light bulbs have improved perhaps 70% in efficiency. Electric motors have gone from 80% to 95%. But how do you go beyond that? It didn’t take much to increase the efficiency of furnaces by 50%, but now that they’re at 90%, there is no way to even gain an additional 11% improvement. I could go on. Like “hemp and hydrogen”, “efficiency” is an easy word to say, but that’s all. In term of “green energy”, everybody likes windmills these days, so long as they put them in front of somebody else’s view. It takes perhaps 2000 windmills to make as much electricity as one nuclear plant, and that’s only when the wind is blowing at full force, which it doesn’t always do.
What these youngsters should start trying to make “thinkable” to themselves is that they can’t have it all. It’s like in the saying, “Faster, better, cheaper — chose any two”. The spoiled generations (from boomers down to their grandkids) were an anomaly in human history. Shortage has ruled the human race far more often than not. The new generation today is going to have to make hard choices. They don’t get to have it all. It’s going to take them a long time to realize that and there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but eventually they will run out of politicians and corporations to blame and will have to accept the merciless rules of nature and physics.
In this case, you don’t get to have all the electricity you want, as cheaply as you want, without environmental destruction. You can have a nicer environment, or you can have more electricity, but you can’t have both. “Conservation” and “green energy” are wishful thinking when what’s needed are thousands of gigawatts. It’s an important lesson, coming soon to a gas station, a grocery store, and an Avista bill near you.
force_vector on March 27 at 7:40 p.m.
“Shortage has ruled the human race far more often than not.”
Based on the number of Chevy’s posing as monster trucks around here, I’d say it still does in Spokane.
Bruce (aka thatoneguy) on March 27 at 11:17 p.m.
From this article it looks like the Japanese are doing a pretty good job of facing up to the new reality.
What is happening there on a (probably) temporary basis could happen all over on a permanent basis if we don’t get our act together.*
*typed at 11:18pm in a brightly lit house with wireless internet. Mmmmmm, irony.