Northern Japan's power shortage becomes acute
Tue Aug 9, 2011 9:5PM
Michael Penn, Press TV, Tokyo
The March 11 earthquake and tsunami may have made the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant globally well known due to its reactor meltdowns, but this town too was the host to a Japanese nuclear power plant.
This is Onagawa, and the nuclear power plant here is operated by the Tohoku Electric Power Company, the monopoly that both generates and distributes power to the northern part of Japan's main island.
The Onagawa plant has been offline since the day of the disaster, reducing the energy available.
But the drop-off in nuclear power is only one of the problems that the Tohoku Electric Company has been having; they are now having difficulty with their hydroelectric power plants as well.
Record heavy rains in late July caused disruption to hydroelectric power plants accounting for about 1,000 megawatts of supply. Now, with hot temperatures boosting demand to over 98% of electricity-generation capacity, the utility is making a public appeal.
In order to avoid rolling blackouts, which would damage productivity at electronics and other factories-impacting even the global economy through supply chains-Tohoku Electric has turned to its sister company TEPCO to help make up the shortfall.
But experts point out more broadly that the Japanese utilities have been caught flat-footed because they were slow to develop non-nuclear sources of energy.
Schulz also points out that electricity generation may not, in fact, be the key problem.
So it seems that Japan would be best advised not to try to massively boost power generation, but rather to more efficiently utilize the power that it already has.
