Japan’s booming solar industry may be going bust due to subsidy cuts and power grid issues that have prompted 91 different solar power bankruptcies since 2013, according to an article published Wednesday in Bloomberg.
Japan’s attempts to subsidize solar power haven’t gone well. The country still imports $40 billion worth of oil, coal and natural gas annually and the solar industry appears set to collapse.
“As the declining volume of PV module shipments shows, the market is shrinking,” Takehiro Kawahara, an analyst for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said Wednesday. “[T]he shrinking domestic market forces them to lower costs to remain in competition with international players or consider exiting the segment.”
Nuclear power provided 29 percent of Japan’s total power output before 2011, but will decline to 13.6 percent by 2023 and 1.2 percent by 2040, according to reports. Japan got 24 percent of its electricity from coal in 2010 and the country plans to get more than a third of its power from coal by 2040. Japan previously shut down all of its nuclear reactors in the aftermath of the 2011 magnitude 9.0 earthquake, which triggered the Fukushima disaster. The country has since transitioned away from nuclear power, but its latest policy pronouncements see nuclear accounting for as much as 22 percent of Japan’s power mix by 2030.
Solar power provided less than 3.5 percent of all electricity generated in Japan in 2015.
[excerpted]http://dailycaller.com/2016/07/07/japans-solar-industry-faces-massive-bust-after-subsidy-cuts/
