The sun returned on Wednesday March 23 in Tokyo, without dispelling fears of power cuts in the capital and northeastern Japan. In question, “the 7.4 magnitude earthquake of March 16 in the northeast of the country, the shutdown of power stations and the return of cold weather”, observes Go Matsuo, network analyst and member of the International Council of Large Electricity Networks (Cigre). It snowed on March 22 in the Japanese capital, and temperatures remain wintery.
“Distribution is still unstable”, recognizes the Tokyo Electricity Company (Tepco). Because of the earthquake, Tepco and the Tohoku Electricity Company lost eight units of eight coal and gas thermal power plants in the departments of Fukushima and Miyagi (Northeast), the most affected by the earthquake. These eight units, with a total capacity of 3.4 gigawatts, could remain out of service for several months.
The two companies could have managed the situation without the cold snap that fell on the archipelago on March 21. The government and electricity companies have urgently called on people and businesses to save power, by turning off unnecessary lights and setting the heating to a maximum of 20°C. On Twitter, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida expressed concern over a request “always above the target set”.
These calls were heard even though, on March 22 at 6 p.m., demand reached 91% of capacity. The blackouts that threatened nearly three million homes have also been averted, according to Tepco, “thanks to the help of companies from neighboring regions”like that of the Chubu, which supplies Nagoya and the center of the archipelago.
The development of renewable energies is progressing
Not enough to reassure, however, because, according to the Ministry of Industry, the short-term situation has never been so serious since the earthquake, the tsunami and the nuclear disaster in Fukushima which occurred in March 2011. t the time, faced with the risk of a power shortage during the summer – a period of high consumption – the government had obliged, from the 1er July, the 15,000 companies using more than 500 kilowatts to operate, to reduce their consumption by 15% compared to the peak reached in the summer of 2010. Many had been running their production lines during the summer holidays, the weekends ends and at night, reduced demand periods.
It is too early to say whether such measures will be necessary this year, but the current crisis illustrates the difficulties of a network in transition. After the Fukushima disaster, Japan shut down all of its fifty-four nuclear reactors, which supplied 30% of its electricity. Due to the strict safety standards and the opposition of the always defiant populations, only ten of them were revived.
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