By Paul Homewood
BBC – where “news from Japan” means talking to a 70 year old eco activist!
It was a glorious autumn afternoon and I was standing on the hillside overlooking Tokyo Bay. Beside me was Takao Saiki, a polite gentleman usually in his 70s.
But today Saiki-San is angry.
“It was a complete joke,” he said, in perfect English. “Ridiculous!”
His accident was caused by a huge construction site blocking our view of the bay – a 1.3 gigawatt coal-fired power plant under construction.
“I don’t understand why we still have to burn coal to generate electricity,” said Rikuro Suzuki, Saiki-San’s friend. “This plant alone will emit more than seven million tons of carbon dioxide every year!”
Suzuki-San’s point is a good point. Should Japan cut coal consumption, not increase consumption at a time of great concern about coal’s impact on the climate?
So why coal? The answer is the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.
In 2010, about a third of Japan’s electricity came from nuclear power, and there are plans to build more. But then the 2011 disaster struck, and all of Japan’s nuclear power plants were closed. Ten years later, most are still closed – and there’s a lot of resistance to restarting them.
In their place, Japan’s gas-fired power plants were running too long. However, as Britain recently discovered, natural gas is very expensive.
Therefore, the Japanese Government has decided to build 22 new coal-fired power plants, running on cheap coal imported from Australia. Economically, it makes sense. Environmentally, not so much. Japan is currently under great pressure to stop using coal.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-59525480
The BBC is still revealing Japan’s intention to build 22 new coal power plants over the next five years. carbon dioxide emissions of 74 million tonnes, about a quarter of all UK emissions.
People talk about eventually producing blue hydrogen from coal, and converting plants to burn it instead. However, it’s really the pie in the sky, as it needs to capture carbon in the hydrogen process. If you have it, you can also use it in the coal plants themselves and keep burning coal.
The reality is that CCS can only capture a fraction of carbon dioxide. Whereas green hydrogen will always be terribly expensive.
The BBC’s preferred solution is, of course, renewable energy:
“Japanese companies need cheap electricity to be competitive, and they need clean electricity to be accepted internationally. That means they need renewable electricity. Delaying this development will harm the Japanese economy.”
However, it can be a little tricky with that!
Energy Rating BP
This may not be the case with the BBC, but Japan cannot just import electricity when wind and solar are not stable. It has no connectors and I highly doubt it wants to be completely dependent on Russia or China for its power.
With the end of the supply of nuclear power, Japan has few alternatives to using fossil fuels, whatever the BBC and Saiki-San may think.
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