A northern Japanese city’s efforts to rebuild its electric power system after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami mark a quiet shift away from the country’s old utility model toward self-reliant, local generation and transmission. After losing three-quarters of its homes and 1,100 people…
A northern Japanese city’s efforts to rebuild its electric power system after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami mark a quiet shift away from the country’s old utility model toward self-reliant, local generation and transmission.
After losing three-quarters of its homes and 1,100 people in the March 2011 temblor and tsunami, the city of Higashi Matsushima turned to the Japanese government’s « National Resilience Program, » with 3.72 trillion yen ($33.32 billion) in funding for this fiscal year, to rebuild.
The city of 40,000 chose to construct micro-grids and de-centralized renewable power generation to create a self-sustaining system capable of producing an average of 25 percent of its electricity without the need of the region’s local power utility.
The city’s steps illustrate a massive yet little known effort to take dozens of Japan’s towns and communities off the power grid and make them partly self-sufficient in generating electricity.
« At the time of the Great East Japan earthquake, we couldn’t secure power and had to go through incredible hardships, » said Yusuke Atsumi, a manager at HOPE, the utility Higashi Matsushima created to manage the local generation and grid.
Under a large-scale power system a « blackout at one area would lead to wide-scale power outages. But the independent distributed micro-grid can sustain power even if the surrounding area is having a blackout. »
The Resilience Program is mainly for building back-up capabilities for Japan’s cities and towns in the event of another disaster such as the earthquake and tsunami that caused meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
