Decarbonising energy: Japan’s road to net-zero

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n late October, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga – who won power in a leadership election following former PM Shinzo Abe’s resignation announcement in August – used his first policy address to parliament since taking office to announce a significant shot in the arm for the ambition of the country’s climate targets.

In line with similar announcements in the EU and UK, Japan has now set a target to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and meet its obligations under the 2015 Paris Agreement. Previously, the country’s top target was limited to reducing emissions by 80% by 2050, with its nationally determined contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement, which are defined by the country’s periodically-reviewed Basic Energy Plan, deemed “highly insufficient” by the Climate Action Tracker.

Japan’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party has long been criticised by environmental groups for its unambitious climate policy. Of particular note has been its continued reliance on coal power and its broader reluctance to invest heavily in clean energy for fear of the effect on electricity prices and its economy, particularly after the Fukushima disaster in 2011 prompted a sustained decline in the country’s baseload nuclear energy capacity.

In that sense, Suga’s comments marked a clear departure for Japanese climate policy, not only in the heightened ambition of its targets but also as a milestone in the political acceptance that tackling climate change could represent an economic opportunity rather than a burden.

“Responding to climate change is no longer a constraint on economic growth,” Suga said. “We need to change our thinking to the view that taking assertive measures against climate change will lead to changes in industrial structure and the economy that will bring about great growth.”

Japan’s bold new target has been enthusiastically (if cautiously) received by climate campaigners and UN officials alike.

“Overall, this is a welcome development from the world’s fifth-largest emitter,” Climate Action Tracker noted in an October comment. “Also notable is that the Japanese Government has always argued that climate policy was too expensive, but now PM Suga is talking about growth.”

A spokesperson for UN Secretary-General António Guterres said: “With this announcement, Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, joins a growing group of major economies committed to lead by example in building a sustainable, carbon neutral and climate resilient world by 2050.” But the statement made a point of looking forward to “the concrete policy measures that will be proposed and implemented to reach this goal”.

The Japanese Government is currently working on revisions to its Basic Energy Plan to facilitate greater emissions reductions, and is expected to submit an amended 2030 NDC to the UN in time for the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in November 2021. In other words, the hard work to create a legislative framework that actually meets the country’s new climate goals has now begun, and national circumstances are such that there are sure to be some bumps along the way in Japan’s journey to net-zero.

To make a carbon-neutral Japan a possibility by 2050, climate groups are calling for a dramatic scale-up of targets under the country’s 2030 NDC. The Renewable Energy Institute (REI), for example, has called for Japan’s 2030 emissions target to be increased from 26% to 46% reduction on 2010 levels, and the renewable energy target to be raised from 24% to 45% renewables in the energy mix. Coal-fired power, the Institute argues, should be phased out entirely.

“It is necessary to significantly strengthen the greenhouse gas reduction target for 2030, and to completely phase out coal-fired power generation, including those which have been called ‘high efficiency’,” said REI executive director Teruyuki Ohno.

The ‘high efficiency’ comment was likely elicited due to the government’s July announcement that it would accelerate the shutdown of old, inefficient coal power stations. Meanwhile, the country has an ongoing programme to build up to 22 more efficient coal power plants, using modern ultra-supercritical boilers that produce far fewer emissions per unit of energy.

While Suga noted in his address that Japan will “drastically change our long-standing policies on coal-fired power generation”, it’s unlikely that a wholescale coal phase-out is considered feasible by the government in the short term.

Japan’s current NDC target is to generate 26% of its electricity from coal-fired plants by 2030. While this may be revised significantly downward as the government amends its Basic Energy Plan over the next year, there’s not much room to manoeuvre from an energy security perspective. Japan is heavily reliant on imported fossil fuels for its domestic power generation and with much of the country’s nuclear fleet still inactive, coal is making up the shortfall.

Japan also finances and provides technology for coal-fired plants internationally, although this year it agreed that it would not in principle fund coal projects in countries that did not have a decarbonisation plan.

So if coal remains on the table and nuclear is currently being swept under it, how can Japan meet its net-zero goal by mid-century? Few concrete details have emerged, although Suga’s speech provided some indications. The PM highlighted carbon capture, storage, and recycling technologies as being among the “revolutionary innovations” that will help drive the country’s green growth.

Prioritising these carbon sequestration measures would certainly point the way towards hitting climate targets while retaining coal in the energy mix, but as University of Tokyo associate professor Masahiro Sugiyama pointed out in a recent editorial for the East Asia Forum, the technology is incredibly complex and largely unproven as a scalable abatement method.

“Many CDR [carbon dioxide removal] techniques rely on carbon capture and storage, but this faces public acceptance issues,” Sugiyama wrote. “Aside from some demonstration projects in places like Tomakomai, Hokkaido, there has been very little progress. Given the long time required for stakeholder consultation, dialogue should be started immediately.”

Renewable energy technologies were also prioritised in Suga’s speech, with the PM giving particular emphasis to “next-generation solar cells”. Japan has already made strong progress in renewable energy deployment in recent years; with approximately 19% of the country’s energy mix supplied by clean sources (predominantly solar and wind) in 2019 and more than 45GW of distributed solar power installed to date, there is certainly room for an upwards revision of its 2030 renewables target.

As Japan has some of the highest renewable energy costs in the world and has struggled to balance competing priorities in emissions reduction and controlling energy prices, increased investment in more efficient solar cells could help to bring these costs down (although Covid-19 and the oil price crash has also helped reduce power supply costs by 15% in 2020, according to Wood Mackenzie).

Japan is already a hub for high-tech solar PV concepts. In February, Panasonic and the publicly owned New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization announced the development of the world’s most efficient perovskite solar modules, with 16.09% energy conversion, combining lightweight glass substrate with a large-area coating method based on inkjet printing. This kind of innovation will help solar technologies penetrate deeper into residential and industrial markets.

“This large-area, lightweight, and high-conversion efficiency module allows for generating solar power highly efficiently at locations where conventional solar panels were difficult to install, such as façades,” Panasonic said in a press release.

To help mitigate some of the harder-to-shift emissions in Japan’s industrial sector, the government will have to further develop its clean fuel supply chain. The country is already one of the world’s largest markets for imported hydrogen fuels, with 90% of demand coming from refineries, which mainly use them to remove sulphur and other impurities from diesel and petrol.

Hydrogen from non-fossil fuel sources is currently two to four times cheaper than green hydrogen production, although IHS Markit has projected that carbon-free hydrogen production could reach price parity with natural gas-based production methods. As one of the world’s largest hydrogen markets, Japan can help drive investment in clean fuels with initiatives such as the world-first blue ammonia shipment from Saudi Arabia in September.

Amid wider discussions around decarbonisation in Japan, the country’s nuclear sector is the elephant in the room. The government is supportive of nuclear’s role as a clean energy source to help meet its Paris Agreement targets, and is working to restart a number of power plants that were mothballed after Fukushima. Japan’s current NDC envisions nuclear plants providing 20%-22% of the country’s electricity, but in 2019 nuclear represented just 3% of the energy mix.

Suga’s speech noted that the government will advance its nuclear energy policy “with the highest priority on safety”, as the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) continues to weigh nuclear plant restart applications against stringent earthquake safety standards introduced after the meltdown at Fukushima in 2011. As of November, 16 reactors at nine nuclear plants have received the green light to restart; Japan’s Agency for Natural Resources has said that 30 reactors will need to be reactivated to reach the 20%-22% goal by 2030.

Hitting this milestone will be challenging for a number of reasons, including the cost of meeting new technical standards to relicense and restart reactors, which may be seen by operators as too high risk, particularly if renewable energy costs continue to fall through the 2020s. Post-Fukushima, a large proportion of Japanese citizens have lost faith in nuclear power; a 2016 survey by newspaper Asahi Shimbun found that 57% of the public opposed restarting reactors, even if they meet new safety standards, while 73% supported a broader nuclear phase-out.

This mistrust will make it yet more costly and time-consuming to restart plants; in fact, it already has. In December, the Osaka District Court cancelled the NRA’s approval for the restart of two reactors at Kepco’s Ōi nuclear plant in Fukui Prefecture, persuaded by the plaintiffs that the NRA had not properly applied its new earthquake safety standards when it approved the restart in 2017. While the decision could be overturned on appeal, this is the first time a court has directly contradicted the NRA in a ruling and could set a template for further legal challenges of reactor restarts.

The consensus is now that the government is highly unlikely to meet its nuclear generation goals for 2030, and may not be able to rely on its existing atomic infrastructure to meet its climate goals. With nuclear on shaky ground in terms of political viability, Japan’s road to net-zero by 2050 looks all the more challenging.