After an earthquake knocked out power to 5.3 million people this week, Hokkaido Electric restored service to most of them by the end of Friday, but experts say the island-wide outage highlights fundamental flaws in Japan’s power grid. The blackout that hit Hokkaido after early Thursday’s
After an earthquake knocked out power to 5.3 million people this week, Hokkaido Electric restored service to most of them by the end of Friday, but experts say the island-wide outage highlights fundamental flaws in Japan’s power grid.
The blackout that hit Hokkaido after early Thursday’s quake was the nation’s worst in seven years, but it would have been less extensive if the utility was not so reliant on one large power station, had spread its plants more widely, and could transfer power more easily from other areas, specialists and energy executives said.
In the aftermath of Japan’s March 2011 disaster, when an earthquake and tsunami caused nuclear meltdowns and widespread power outages, the government mandated a boost in renewable energy supplies, opened up a roughly $70 billion retail electricity market to competition and created a grid oversight company to address these issues.
But Hokkaido and other Japanese utilities have been slow to beef up networks and make them more resilient in a country that regularly experiences natural disasters, the specialists said.
«The crisis is primarily the result of over-reliance on a large coal plant in a centralized generation paradigm,» said Andrew DeWit, a professor of energy policy at Rikkyo University in Tokyo.
«That is odd and dangerous, considering the multiplicity of hazards Japan confronts and has experienced in recent years.
