Japanese, in Shortage, Willingly Ration Watts

TOKYO — With Japan suffering from electricity shortages this summer, Michio Kuniyuki has stepped up his conservation patrols of Rikkyo University.

As he has done these past six summers, Mr. Kuniyuki spends his days making sure the lights and air-conditioning have not been left on in empty classrooms. Whenever he finds students in a classroom, he turns off the air-conditioning and inquires about the lights.

“Should I leave them on or can I turn them off?” Mr. Kuniyuki asked one day.

“Uh,” one young man hesitated, giving Mr. Kuniyuki the opening for his next move.

Click. Off.

Now backed by a colleague newly assigned to the patrols, Mr. Kuniyuki has been able to strategically map out their routes throughout the campus and outwit students who used to switch the lights back on as soon as they saw his back. “It’s doubly effective,” he said.

Already a leader in conservation, Japan consumes about half as much energy per capita as the United States, according to the United Nations Population Fund. But it has been pushed to even greater lengths since the nuclear disaster even as it tries to revive its economy. The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and the resulting backlash against nuclear power have left only 17 out of Japan’s 54 reactors online as the nation steels itself for August, the hottest month of the year.

Preliminary figures indicate that regions under conservation mandates have been able to meet reduction targets and even exceed them, providing a possible model of conservation’s potential when concerns about global warming are mounting. In the Tokyo area, the government is pushing to cut electricity use by 15 percent between 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. on weekdays to prevent blackouts — and on Thursday, for example, that target was met compared with last year.

Japanese are bringing to the conservation drive a characteristic combination of national fervor, endurance, sloganeering, technology and social coercion.

A “Super Cool Biz” campaign, which builds on the option of no-tie summer business attire begun in 2005, now encourages salarymen to dress down even further by wearing polo shirts or the traditional aloha-style shirts worn on the Japanese tropical islands of Okinawa.

To back up the call to conserve, electricity reports that forecast the day’s power supply and track demand in real time have become as much a part of this summer as the scorching sun and humid air. They are delivered along with the weather on the morning news and announced along with the next stop aboard some trains.

Government alerts are also sent to subscribers’ cellphones if overall demand nears capacity, prodding households to turn down the air-conditioner or, better yet, turn it off altogether.

The forecasts, available since the start of the month on the Web sites of power companies and in the news media, show the amount of electricity currently being used in a utility’s service area, as well as the consumption for the same day last year.

In the Tokyo area, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, the operator of the Fukushima plant, issues a forecast in the evening for the next day, then refines the forecast the following morning depending on the changing weather. During the day, Tepco updates electricity use every five minutes, in a bar graph that predictably shows use rising steadily in the morning and peaking in the afternoon.

In the past week, forecasts and actual use have hovered around 75 percent of capacity, thanks to unseasonably cool weather brought on by a typhoon. Yukihiko Tayama, a Tepco manager specializing in demand and supply, said that so far this summer, overall demand had yet to come dangerously close to capacity, and so it was unclear whether the real-time reports would influence people’s behavior in a crunch. The real test lies ahead in August, Mr. Tayama said.

Local governments are holding contests soliciting conservation ideas; households are cutting back beyond the hours during which conservation is in effect, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.; and companies have shifted days off to weekdays and undertaken other measures not only to avoid penalties — maximum penalties are less than $13,000 — but also to contribute to the national effort.


Source: http://www.nytimes.com

Posted in: World News