With the Fukushima nuclear plant was disabled by the disaster, and the Hamaoka nuclear plant shut down due to safety fears, Japan is suffering from a power shortage right now. As such, energy saving devices (such as an air-conditioner that senses the activity of people and adjust their cooling appropriately) have become more popular.
“The interest level has risen quite a bit,” says Bic Camera salesman Kai Fujiwara. “If you are talking about [energy efficient] LED lights alone, it’s twice as much as before the quake. LED lights are expensive, 20 or 40 times more than ordinary light bulbs, but people are buying 10 at a time.”
With energy capacity down as much as 20 percent in some areas of the north-east, energy saving methods like coming to the office in shorts during the summer, are being considered. The way electricity is sold is being changed, with Kirin brewery at Yokohama selling electricity to the national grid from their back up generators providing power to 3,000 homes.
“I don’t think any of us imagined we would lose the power supply because of a natural disaster like we did,” says Junichi Nonaka, the Kirin brewery manager. “So we have realized that we took unlimited electricity for granted. We also now know we need to save energy and not to waste it.”
One thing the disaster may do is stimulate the economy by finding new sources of power. “Japan is full of geothermal resources,” says Taishi Sugiyama from the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry. “There are many volcanoes If we successfully develop that, then it can be one of our major electricity supplies. You have hot water everywhere in Japan. If we drill much deeper we can tap geothermal resources. The potential is close to 10 percent of Japanese power supply.”
Source: BBC
