Antinuclear

Japan developing smart energy efficiency and renewable energy

In the Wake of Fukushima: Japan’s Nuclear Energy Policy Impasse  60% of Japan’s 48 viable nuclear reactors,are not as yet being considered for application to the Nuclear Regulation Agency (NRA) for restart By Andrew Dewit Global Research, April 07, 2014
Asia-Pacific Journal

“…….Smart Cities

Amazingly, a smart and green, ICT-centred growth strategy was approved by the Abe Cabinet on June 14 of 2013. The growth strategy is also very powerfully informed by the disruptive potential opened up by the rebuild of the devastated regions on the basis of renewable and distributed energy.23 But it also has a larger purchase in the political economy debate because – as with ICT-centered “industrial Internet,” “machine to machine,” “big data,” and related emergent paradigms – it is aimed at a profound restructuring of the energy economy as well as much of the rest of the infrastructures that make up the modern urban community and the exchange of resources and information among citizens, businesses and their governments.

This emergent paradigm is not peculiar to Japan. The smart city model began to take shape in the early 2000s. But from the beginning of the 2010s, worsening resource, economic, and climate crises were paralleled by such technical advances as the diffusion of “big data” analytics via the cheapening and miniaturization of sensors.24 These and other developments increasingly point to the disruption not just of centralized power generation and transmission but also of a resource-intensive growth dynamic that has characterized the developed economies over the past six decades.25

The “dematerialization” of the economy has been an aim in Japan and Germany since the 1980s, with an increasing sophistication of policies and programs for reducing resource waste through greater efficiency and recycling, development and deployment of more sustainable practices, and the other initiatives. But these initiatives were generally seen as more or less costly interventions in the mainstream economy to reformat and reduce its throughputs and polluting outputs. The ICT strategy, through its deployment of sensors that monitor a multitude of aspects of the ambient environment as well as system parameters, is already working to accelerate this transformation of the conventional economy through increasing the payback from new processes.

In this respect, it is very ironic but telling that some of the most aggressive deployment of ICT is evident in conventional energy. The mining firm Rio Tinto, for example, revealed in early 2014 that its initial deployment of “big data” ICT to enhance efficiencies saved it USD 80 million over 2013.26 The oil industry’s use of “big data” in what it refers to as the “digital oil field” is another example. Their per-barrel price for oil exploration and production has roughly quintupled over the past decade, to over USD 100/barrel. Their aggressive of ICT shows what very hard-pressed actors can do in the face of rapidly rising costs.27

Team Abe might want to learn a lesson from this, and stress the ICT-centred renewable and radical efficiency policies they have already passed. The same goes for the simplistic anti-nuclear critics who would be satisfied with continuing to burn more coal.

Andrew DeWit is Professor in the School of Policy Studies at Rikkyo University and an Asia-Pacific Journal coordinator. With Iida Tetsunari and Kaneko Masaru, he is coauthor of “Fukushima and the Political Economy of Power Policy in Japan,” in Jeff Kingston (ed.) Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan. Recommended citation: Andrew DeWit, “Japan’s Energy Policy Impasse,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 14, No. 1, April 7, 2014.   http://www.globalresearch.ca/in-the-wake-of-fukushima-japans-energy-policy-impasse/5376899?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=in-the-wake-of-fukushima-japans-energy-policy-impasse

April 7, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized