Comments on: Reducing electricity usage in Japan

By: Saving domestic electricity in September | 世論 What Japan Thinks

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 15:46:06 +0000

[...] reported on the second regular survey into saving electricity by goo Research. The first survey may be found here. Note that the dates of the survey indicate that it was conducted after TEPCO removed their [...]

By: DerekNobuyuki Wallace

DerekNobuyuki Wallace — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 03:12:13 +0000

Thanks for the additional information!

By: Ken Y-N

Ken Y-N — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 15:53:53 +0000

I’m not really aware of how much effort individuals in Kanto put into reducing power usage, but I saw a good number of reports on NHK about what small companies were having to do. The lack of power was forcing a lot to start looking at or accelerate their plans for moving overseas. Then on top of that we now have the solar power buy-back scheme and TEPCO bumping their rates up 10%…

Kansai Denryoku has been advertising asking people to cut down, and our company joined in out of solidarity with our Kanto and Tohoku divisions, and of course any excuse to try to save a few yen!

Most of the Kansai reactors are off, I think. Remember that they shut down once every 13 months for an overhaul and none have been turned back on since March. I wonder what our new PM’s views on the stress tests and nuclear power in general are?

By: DerekNobuyuki Wallace

DerekNobuyuki Wallace — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 15:46:57 +0000

I think a key point that is seemingly lacking in the data is whether people are in an actual heavy setsuden region or not.

I thought you were in Kansai so I’m surprised that your company would have so many “power saving” initiatives.

My understanding is that critical power shortages causing power companies to instead burn a lot of fossil fuels to generate electricity…
are not really in the 60Hz side of the country.

I think it would have made sense to compare the data between heavily setsuden affected regions and others since their attitudes would probably differ greatly.

I know a lot of people on this (strangely 50Hz) side of the divide with massive changes to their everyday lives due to setsuden.
Aside from the usual things like the trains running on “increased profit” scheduling mode, temperatures set to 28 or 29 or 30C in the office, parks will high volumes of late night pedestrian traffic being super dark and potentially scary at night….
but other things like being forced to have abnormal vacation times, changing the work schedule so that saturday and sunday are work days (other traditionally weekdays become new days off).

Back in my home region of Kansai, a lot of people I know have basically done little that I would expect to make an impacting difference (despite some people trying to do what they feasibly can).
Individuals at home should try to reduce energy consumption in general to reduce reliance on burning fossil fuels…
and possibly seemingly more importantly to reduce their monthly power bill…
but overal the impact is likely pretty small (and correct me if I’m wrong, but the need to reduce energy consumption is not that much greater than 1 year ago… Kansai has three clusters of nuclear power plants but aren’t they currently in operation? Again, please correct me if I’m wrong)

Factories, companies, train companies, etc… are the ones that would really feel the pressure to save energy and I don’t think the 60Hz side of the country is really being pressured in the same way.