METI Blocks Renewable

Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and its Subcommittee on Energy started discussion for reviewing the system for purchasing renewable energy, which has been encouraged after the disaster in First Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. Nuclear village of in Japan including METI has strongly been reluctant to promote renewable energy to defend nuclear energy. This time, it introduced an argument that renewable energy will be produced too much. Why Japan cannot utilize renewable energy with amount of two times greater than before the accident, while European countries uses it over ten times more than a decade ago? That is because METI blocks it.

Electricity suppliers started rejecting purchase of renewable energy from individual producers against the principle of a law legislated after the disaster. Main reason was electricity produced by solar generation would be too much to maintain supply network. It is hard to imagine for a country definitely in need of alternative energy to erode capability of producing renewable energy. It is highly ridiculous contradiction.

Some argue that the scheme of purchasing renewable energy has fundamentally been inappropriate from the beginning. The system was engineered not to be able to accept abrupt increase of renewable energy, namely solar, while it encourages broad prevalence of it on the other hand. Having heavily invested on nuclear energy, power companies have firmly been lazy in reinforcing supply network, making a cause for rejecting renewable energy.

METI is responsible for all those happened. It must have been METI’s job to urge the power companies to improve the system, if they were reluctant. The reason why the ministry did not do that was because stake was too high on nuclear energy for them. As a country devastated by a great war for seeking energy in Southeast Asia, energy directly connects national interest. As long as METI deals with energy policy, it can be a ministry dealing with national interest, keeping its status high in hierarchy of bureaucracy. If not, they will be dropped.

METI is recognized as one of three major ministries in Kasumigaseki, paralleled with Ministries of Finance and Foreign Affairs. MOF and MOFA are dominated by the graduates from Law Division of Tokyo University, while METI is led by school of Economy or Engineering of the same university. After all, survival of METI is a trivial struggle between divisions in Tokyo University, which narrow-minded bureaucrats insist so much. The people need to realize this cost of bureaucracy. They will at least have to pay for highly expensive utility fee caused by ineffective power supply system.