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Reiwa Shinsengumi and the Environment

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Three years ago I wrote about how Reiwa Shinsengumi, often described as a “left-wing populist” party, and its leader Yamamoto Tarō refused to condemn Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, instead spreading Russian propaganda narratives that perversely blamed the war on NATO, which Ukraine was not even member of.

Left wing parties tend to be more pro-environmental than conservative or right wing parties that tend to be less motivated to take aggressive action to minimize climate change. How does Reiwa Shinsengumi rank in this regard? Well, it’s not exactly a Japanese Green Party, let’s put it like that!

Yes, Reiwa Shinsengumi is strongly anti-nuclear, opposing a restart of nuclear power stations idled after the 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown. Instead it wants to phase out all restarted nuclear power stations. That by itself is no pro-environmental position: While it may minimize risks of future nuclear disasters, it does nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, if anything it makes it more challenging. While nuclear accidents may be a possibility, the climate disaster is a certainty if we continue on the present course.

In a 2022 questionnaire for the House of Councillors (Upper House) elections the party responds to a question:

Q: Will you reduce domestic coal power to zero by 2030?
A: [Yes]
[Supplementary Explanation:] In order to achieve “100% renewable energy,” we will utilize high-efficiency natural gas-fired thermal power as an interim energy source. We will not restart nuclear power plants. In earthquake-prone Japan, we will go for both coal-free and nuclear power-free. We will utilize abundant natural energy sources.

Note how they answer this with a direct promotion of LNG, much of which Japan has been importing from Sakhalin in Russia. The answer does not specifically mention wind and solar, the two “abundant natural energy sources” that Japan has been badly neglecting. The actual environmental benefits of LNG over coal are quite questionable. A 2024 Cornell University study found the climate footprint of LNG 33% worse than that of coal, once liquefaction and shipping are taken into account:

Over 20 years, the carbon footprint for LNG is one-third larger than coal, when analyzed using the measurement of global warming potential, which compares the atmospheric impact for different greenhouse gases. Even on a 100-year time scale – a more-forgiving scale than 20 years – the liquefied natural gas carbon footprint equals or still exceeds coal, Howarth said.
(“Liquefied natural gas carbon footprint is worse than coal“, 2024-10-03)

This commitment to phasing out coal by a specific year is already progress however from the 2019 stance of the party. Philip Brasor wrote about Yamamoto Tarō in Japan Times:

In fact, he has advocated for coal as the transition energy source toward renewables in Japan, a position that dismays environmentalists.
(“Taro Yamamoto blurs the popular line on climate change”, Japan Times, 2019-11-30)

I am highly skeptical of Reiwa Shinsengumi’s commitment to the environment. Yes, it is against nuclear power, but without a robust policy for switching electricity generation to wind, solar and geothermal, phasing out existing nuclear power stations will only make it more difficult to decarbonize power generation and could even promote fossil-fuel burning thermal power stations. As far as I can tell, the party has no detailed plan for promoting green power. It seems like an afterthought next to its more sexy anti-nuclear policies that promise to catch votes for it.

Advocating for a big push for onshore and offshore wind and a massive expansion of long distance transmission lines needed to bring power from windy coasts in Hokkaido, the Northeast and the Japan sea coast to the urban centers in the Kanto and Kansai is essential but nowhere near as effective at adding seats in parliament because you would have to do a lot of leg work explaining the policy. Populists don’t want to do that because they are more interested in gaining influence than in putting in place policies that actually benefit people.

Reiwa Shinsengumi’s policies are selected by its unchallenged leader. In that it resembles the German BSW (Sarah Wagenknecht Alliance), another supposed left wing party that is spreading narratives of Vladimir Putin’s fascist government. BSW is not run by its members but exclusively according to the whims of its leader. Unsurprisingly, BSW also sees Germany’s economic salvation in the resumption of supplies of Russian gas and not in an accelerated switch to wind and solar.

Both parties claim to champion low income members of the population and social policies, but in reality they are pied pipers with sympathies for Putin that must not be trusted.

A Dark day for America

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Yesterday Donald Trump swore an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America.

On the same day he issued an executive order to deny citizenship rights to children born in America if their parents weren’t legally resident in the US. This is a direct violation of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, which has been part of the Constitution for more than 156 years. That man could not even go for one day without breaking the law and his oath of office!

America voted for a felon, so that’s what they got. He was never held responsible for any of the crimes he committed before, during and after his first term.

Having supported an insurrection against the United States by sending a violent mob to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, after having sworn on January 20, 2017 to uphold the Constitution, Trump should have been held ineligible to run for office again under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, but this was never enforced. He should never even have been on the ballot.

Now Trump is allied with a billionaire oligarchy who control social media and own hundreds of billions of dollars that they can freely use to change the outcome of elections. Their representatives sat in the front row at his inauguration, before the cabinet. They run Twitter/X, Threads, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. Do not trust them. Do not depend on them. They are not your friends!

Americans may yet reclaim their constitutional republic some day. It won’t be easy. My advice is to look at the examples of Hungary, Poland and Turkey, where people have been struggling against autocrats that had been elected into office but then changed all the rules to try and stay on forever. Trump will try the same illiberal playbook. In the case of Poland, the people managed to win back liberal democracy while the struggle in Hungary and Turkey still continues.

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Japan’s new renewable energy plan falls far short

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The Japanese government is preparing a new energy plan that seeks to grow renewable energy, but its goals fall far short of what other major industrial countries are doing. By the year 2040, fifteen years from now, some 40-50% of electricity are to come from renewable sources (roughly a doubling from today), another 20% from nuclear power and the remaining 30-40% from fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.

Meanwhile in Germany, renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, hydro and biomass already accounted for 52% of electricity generated in 2023. By 2030, this share is supposed to grow to 75%. Put another way, Japan is aiming for a lower share for renewable power fifteen years from now than Germany already achieved a year ago!

This is not because somehow Germany’s climate or geography was much more favourable for renewable energy than Japan’s, to the contrary.

Japan lies much closer to the equator than Germany, which means solar panels will be much more productive in the Land of the Rising Sun than in Central Europe. The northernmost point of Hokkaido lies 45° north of the equator while even the southernmost point of Germany lies 47° north. Tokyo is closer to the equator than Southern Spain.

Germany has a lot of wind turbines along its wind swept North Sea and Baltic Sea coasts, both on-shore and off-shore, but its coast line is much shorter than that of Japan: Germany has a total of roughly 21,000 km2 of territorial waters (i.e. within 12 nautical miles of the coast) while the equivalent number for Japan is 440,000 km2.

As factors that hold back renewables, Japan is citing “instability due to being dependent on the weather and its high cost”, when actually solar and wind are already cheaper to install and run than fossil fuel thermal power plants. They are the cheapest sources of newly installed power capacity virtually anywhere on the globe.

For sure, the variability of output must be addressed to be able to provide the majority of power from these sources, but that can be done. For one, the cost of battery storage has dropped dramatically over the past 10-15 years, which has allowed huge amounts of capacity to be added to electricity grids. For example, California grew its battery storage capacity by a factor of over 15 from 2019 to 2024 and now has over 13,000 MW of battery power supporting its grid. This has allowed it to consume renewable energy at different times of the day and not just when there is the most sunlight.

Wind and solar in some ways are complementary sources of power, as wind tends to be stronger after sunset and in the winter, whereas the sun provides the most energy around midday and in summer. Combining the two will minimize the need for storage or for peaker plants that burn gas.

Another way to even out production is by integrating long distance grids so that a surplus in one region can cover the shortfall in another region. Within Europe, Germany exchanges electricity with Scandinavia but also with France, which in turn connects to Italy and Spain. Japan is very weak in this regard. Its electricity grid consists of 8 regional grids with limited interconnect capacity. It is split down the middle by mains frequency, with western Japan using 60 Hz like in North America while eastern Japan uses 50 Hz like in Europe. High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) lines can take care of this, but they need to be built. Regional grid operators have little incentive to do this because they also own existing power stations whose output they want to sell.

Japan needs to rethink its renewable energy strategy if it wants to achieve its climate goals and end its dependency on costly energy imports. Its first priority should not be the profits of its existing electricity sellers, the importers of fossil fuels, the shipyards that build the ships that carry petroleum and coal, etc. Japan needs to upgrade its grid with long distance transmission capacity, grid level power storage and ease connection of wind and solar power capacity to cut its dangerous and harmful dependency on fossil fuels.

The LDP race and the clean energy transition in Japan

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The outcome of the leadership race of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Japan will determine the next prime minister. Failing an electoral defeat of the LDP, which has been in power for most of post-war history, this will also determine the direction of Japan’s future energy policy. Japan is currently trailing far behind most of Europe, the US and China in replacing fossil fuels for electricity production.

According to the Japan Times they face these two choices:

The first is to continue with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s plan to increase the use of nuclear power alongside that of renewable energy.

The second is to reduce nuclear power’s share while moving more toward renewable and ammonia- and hydrogen-generated electricity.

This is a uniquely Japanese framing of the options because if you look around, no other major country is even talking about ammonia-generated electricity. Hydrogen plays mostly a peripheral role in their discussions. That is because these two substances are not really energy sources but energy carriers (just like a charged battery). To produce them you have to use some other form of energy, such as by steam-reforming fossil gas or coal or by hydrolysis of water using wind or solar electricity.

If you use fossil fuel to make hydrogen (or ammonia, its more easily shippable cousin), that does not solve the problem you are trying to address in the first place, CO2 emissions from fossil fuel. If you use renewable electricity to make hydrogen, ship it for thousands of km and then turn it back into electricity, a large part of the green energy will be lost in conversion inefficiencies.

Where do the candidates stand on the issues? Japan Times explains:

Of the nine LDP leadership candidates, three — Takayuki Kobayashi, Taro Kono, and Shigeru Ishiba — have been particularly vocal with their views.

Kobayashi, a former economic security minister, is strongly advocating a new strategy that emphasizes nuclear’s role in meeting future demand.

“The current energy plan is too biased toward renewable energy. We should work toward restarting, replacing and building new nuclear power plants that have been confirmed as safe,” he said during a Sept. 14 debate at the Japan National Press Club.

Former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba, however, favors a future that brings the share of nuclear power close to zero. But he also has a preference for two forms of renewable energy in particular because they are ideal for Japan given its geography.

“Japan has the world’s third-largest potential for geothermal energy. We should also maximize the potential for small-scale hydroelectric power generation,” Ishiba, a former LDP secretary-general, said during the same Sept. 14 debate.

They do not explain where Kono stands, but it was previously reported that he had softened his anti-nuclear stance and now wants to restart more of the reactors shuttered after the Fukushima disaster.

None of the above candidates seem to really have a realistic solution.

Restarting nuclear power stations that have been upgraded to higher safety standards post-Fukushima, may be the low hanging fruit of carbon-free energy generation, but we are only talking about at best adding maybe 10% of total power demand through restarted reactors.

Construction of new reactors could take over a decade, even if sites without seismic risks and with local support could be found quickly, which is far from certain. Recent reactor projects in Europe and the US have been a sobering experience. Olkiluoto 3 in Finland took 17 years from start of construction to electricity production, with costs ballooning from 3 billion € to 11 billion €. Construction of Flamanville 3 in France started in 2007. It went into commercial operation this month, 17 years later. Cost estimates increased from an initial 3.3 billion € to 13.2 billion € two years ago. Hinkley Point C construction started in 2017, with an operational date estimate of 2029-2031 and cost overruns almost killed the project.

If we want to cut out a significant amount of CO2 by 2030, as would be required to have any chance of meeting the Paris climate goals to avoid the worst of the climate disaster, new nuclear reactors aren’t going to cut it, simply because they’re unlikely to have much of an impact before about 2040 and even then they will be very expensive.

So what should the LDP candidates propose, what should Japan do? Japan has a long coastline that can be harnessed for onshore and offshore wind. Solar is one of the cheapest forms of electricity generation available now, cheaper than coal, if the variability of output can be addressed through storage or over-building of supply. The costs of wind and solar power have been falling dramatically for several decades. The cost of battery storage has decreased significantly over the past decade. It’s not rocket science and other countries have already been doing it at a large scale.

Germany, with a much shorter coast line and a more northerly latitude (the latitude of Tokyo is comparable to Gibraltar and Germany’s southern border is further north than Hokkaido) produces the majority of its electricity from renewables, as does Denmark.

Ishiba is not wrong in encouraging geothermal power, which can steadily produce electricity 24 hours a day all year round, or small scale hydro, but it’s neither the cheapest nor the easiest to build energy source.

In terms of cost effectiveness, solar and wind are really without competition. What holds back their use in Japan is a grid that is under-dimensioned for moving large amounts of power around the country because it was designed for a system where generation and consumption are relatively close by, under control of the same regional power company.

This will be different with renewables, where generation could take place more than 1000 km away from consumption and output could shift around the country depending on seasons and weather conditions. Thus what Japan needs is many more high voltage direct current (HVDC) lines that can move a large amount of power over long distances, something that China has invested in heavily in the last two decades. On top of that the permit process has to be streamlined.

All this talk about hydrogen and ammonia has been a huge distraction, perhaps by design. Currently these energy carriers are connected to existing fossil fuel companies. Importing hydrogen (or ammonia made from hydrogen), though quite expensive, would benefit shipbuilding giants and trading companies now handling coal, oil and LNG imports. It’s not really about stopping the climate disaster but about keeping some very large corporates in business.

When will Japan get a prime minister who understands these issues and is bold enough to address them?

Japan’s new energy minister: More of the same

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In his initial press conference, newly appointed Japanese energy minister Nishimura Yasutoshi called for restarting nuclear power stations to secure stable energy supplies. He announced there would be no policy change regarding Japan’s involvement with the Sakhalin-2 LNG project in the Russian Far East.

This choice of main topics of the news conference is typical for the public discourse here about energy policy and security:
1) Talk about whether to restart nuclear power or not
2) Talk about securing fossil fuel imports
3) Do not mention investment into offshore wind
4) Do not mention investment into grid expansion

Topics 3) and 4) are critical for weaning Japan off fossil fuel. 1) is a mere stop gap solution at best. Many nuclear stations shuttered after 2011 are too old for operators to make the necessary investments to bring them up to current safety codes. It wouldn’t be economically viable. The reactors whose restart is being promoted are equivalent to about 1/3 of the pre-2011 nuclear generation or roughly 10 percent of the pre-2011 annual electricity generation. While not trivial, it’s not a game changer. For that, Japan would have to embark on construction of new stations, which would be likely to run into political resistance at the local and national level.

Construction of new nuclear power stations will run into cost issues (see Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, Flamanville/France, Plant Vogtle/Georgia USA, Hinkley Point C/UK, etc). Many of these high profile nuclear projects by different companies in various countries have been billions of euros, dollars and pound over budget and years behind schedule. This seems to be a common theme. To build nuclear power stations takes a decade or more, which means capital is tied up for years and years before the first power flows ever into the grid. For example, construction at Flamanville started in 2007 while fuel loading will not take place before 2023, i.e. 16 years later. Or take Olkiluoto 3, where construction started in 2005 and as of 2022 i.e. 17 years later it still is not operating.

By contrast, large solar or wind projects tend be completed in 2-3 years at most.

As a country with a long coast line Japan has huge wind power potential which will complement its solar potential but it is way behind the curve compared to China, European nations or the US. Almost all renewable energy other than hydro power in Japan has been photovoltaic.

To maximize the potential of renewal energy which will often be found far from population centers, Japan needs to build long distance High Voltage DC (HVDC) lines so power from Kyushu and Hokkaido can supply Tokyo and Osaka.

Offshore wind and HVDC are near absent in the public energy debate in Japan. The Japanese economy suffered “lost decades” after the burst of its 1980s’ investment bubble. Unless it invests in offshore wind (and also geothermal power) and a HVDC grid backbone, it will suffer another lost decade in a delayed energy transition.

So why is the government not acting? The interests of Japanese utility companies on one side and of Japanese power consumers and of the planet as a whole on the other are not aligned and politicians of the ruling LDP-Komeito coalition are picking the wrong side.

Japanese utility companies own existing assets such as old nuclear power stations and thermal power stations. The longer they can utilize these assets to generate and sell power, the more money they will make. If they were forced to buy zero-carbon wind power from third-party offshore wind farms in Hokkaido or Kyushu they won’t be able to sell as much power from their own coal-burning or nuclear power stations in the Kanto or Kansai. Utility companies are still building new coal-burning power plants today. They don’t want to see these plants shuttered but to contribute to their profits for the next 20 years and more.

If we let them get away with it, it would be disastrous for trying to minimize the scale of the climate change threat. Climate change will devastate Japan through hurricanes, flooding, landslides and rising sea levels. The political leaders of Japan need to prioritize the interests of the power consumers and of everyone threatened by climate change. Currently they are acting as lobbyists for the utility companies.

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Battery electric cars in Japan

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BYD, China’s leading EV maker announced it will release three models for the Japanese market in 2023.

Meanwhile Toyota has only launched a single battery electric model in its domestic market (Toyota bZ4X SUV in 2022) while Nissan has launched two (Nissan Leaf in 2010, Nissan Ariya SUV in 2022). Both brands are still concentrating on gasoline-powered hybrids. The bZ4X is also offered as the Subaru Solterra, with some minor differences from the Toyota-badged model.

Germany’s VW is still holding back on its ID.3 and ID.4 models in Japan, perhaps because it can’t manufacture enough of them even for the European market. The VW group is only represented here in the battery electric market by its luxury brands Audi and Porsche.

Korea’s Hyundai launched the Ioniq 5 this spring, with the larger Ioniq 6 to follow next year.

It looks like 2023 will be an interesting year for BEVs in Japan which until now has been lagging far behind China, North America and Europe in the electric mobility transition.

On my last trip to the UK I was amazed by the number of BEVs of every brand and model I saw in London compared to Tokyo. In 2021, only 10,843 Nissan LEAF and another 8,610 imported electric cars were sold in Japan (about 60% of which were Tesla). That’s under 20,000 in total or 0.2 % of about 6.9 million new cars sold. The UK, with roughly half the population of Japan, bought 190,727 new electric cars the same year. About 1 in every 6 new cars registered in June 2022 in the UK was battery electric.

China recognized that BEVs are a strategic move. Taking the lead will allow them to leapfrog laggards like Toyota who are too wedded to their own past successes to make the necessary transition to a decarbonized future. And it’s not just about the cars: China also added more solar and wind power last year than the rest of the world combined to make it possible to charge these cars without burning fossil fuel. It has heavily invested in long distance HVDC transmission to shift renewable power over great distances while Japan’s grid still consists of separate grids in West Japan, East Japan and in Hokkaido with extremely limited interconnection capacity.

A couple of months ago Toyota upgraded its forecast for electric vehicle sales in 2030 from 2 million a year to 3.5 million a year, which is about one third of its current annual sales. That’s for almost a decade in the future! This suggests it doesn’t see a tipping point where battery electric overtakes internal combustion engines until later in the 2030s. It is hardly surprising then that during the recent G7 conference in Germany, Japan lobbied hard to remove a goal of at least 50% zero-emission vehicles for 2030 from the climate goals communique, presumably at the request of its car industry. Meanwhile 80 percent of new car sales in Norway are already battery electric.

When Toyota launched the bZ4X into the Japanese market this year, it announced a sales goal of only 5,000 units, roughly 1/10 of annual sales of the Toyota RAV4 that it most closely resembles and half of the annual volume of the 11 year old Nissan LEAF.

Furthermore, the bZ4X is not offered for sale to individual consumers who can only get it through leasing contracts. Supposedly this is “to eliminate customer concerns regarding battery performance, maintenance, and residual value.” This move paints long term performance of battery electric cars as a weak point when it isn’t (at least it isn’t with Tesla and other brands). By offering only leasing contracts, Toyota is casting shade on the technology.

At least due to the launch of the bZ4X Toyota will install DC fast chargers at its dealerships by 2025. Many Nissan and Mitsubishi dealers already have 30 kW DC chargers installed and a few have 50 kW chargers (more kW means a faster maximum charging rate) while most Toyota dealers still only offer 200 V AC charging, the most basic of all. The maximum charging rate with 200 V AC is a mere 6 kW. In countries with three phase AC, a 3 phase domestic AC charger that supports 11 kW will be offered by Toyota from the end of 2022. Until then, home charging in your garage or driveway will be limited to the lower rate.

DC charging of the bZ4X can go as fast as 150 kW, but available public DC chargers in Japan right now tend to be limited no more than 50 kW (most of them at car dealerships). For example, right now there are only 4 locations in Central Tokyo that offer 90 kW or more.

I think we will see change in the battery electric vehicle market Japan in the next few years, largely driven by foreign manufacturers introducing new models that Toyota, Nissan and other manufacturers will struggle to compete with. But they will have no choice but to step up the pace of the zero-carbon transition if they don’t want to lose their existing market share here in Japan and in export markets. Otherwise Toyota may become the Nokia of the car industry.

Tokyo in a power crunch

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On March 22, 2022 the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation (Tepco) warned electricity consumers in east Japan about the risk of rolling blackouts from a tight supply situation. The recent M7.3 quake near Sendai had knocked several of Tepco’s thermal power plants offline, which left the company in a difficult situation when a cold spell with snow flakes hit the region of the capital. Demand at times exceeded generation capacity and only the availability of pumped hydro storage saved the day before measures to curb demand such as turning down heating and switching off lights averted an outage.

No doubt this experience will increase pressure to restart more nuclear power stations that have been shuttered since the tsunami and nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima in March 2011. Before the nuclear disaster about 30% of Japanese generating capacity were nuclear; now only about 10% comes from restarted nuclear reactors. The current high prices of natural gas will further enhance the attraction of nuclear, at least in the eyes of anyone whose financial interests are tied to the balance sheet of the utility companies, such as their individual and institutional shareholders.

However, that is not the whole story.

While eastern Japan was in a power crunch, western Japan has ample spare capacity, as did Hokkaido. Why could this power not be used in Tokyo? You would have thought Japan would have learnt its lesson from the 3/11 disaster in 2011 and addressed it in the decade since then, but you would be wrong: Japanese electricity markets are still split between a handful of regional near-monopolies with minimal interchange capacities between them. For example, the Hokkaido grid has a generating capacity of 7.5 GW but only 0.6 GW of interchange capacity with Honshu (8% of the total). Tepco supplies up to 47 GW to customers in its area but can only exchange up to 1.2 GW with major utilities in the west of Japan. This leaves little margin when earthquakes or weather events with a regional impact hit supplies.

By contrast, China has built huge high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines between the industrialized coastal cities on one side and hydroelectric power stations near the Tibetan plateau and solar and wind farms in the arid north on the other. Many of these lines are longer than the distance from Tokyo to Hokkaido, let alone Tokyo to Kansai. The Chinese government understands that if it wants to wean itself from the dependence of dirty coal or imported oil and gas then it will need to vastly increase power transfer capacity from the interior of the country where renewables are available to the densely populated urban areas near the coast lines.

Japan is actually in a similar situation. The elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about is offshore wind. While European countries and the US are building up tens of Gigawatts of offshore wind power capacity, Japan has very little installed capacity, particularly offshore. The entire conversations seems to be about nuclear vs. solar vs. gas vs. coal, leaving out one of the most promising renewable energy sources available to Japan. So far the regulatory hurdles for erecting and connecting wind turbines in Japan have been high and that has left wind as an also ran compared to much more widely deployed solar. However, solar does not provide power at all hours. Wind would complement it.

Much of the European wind power capacity is installed offshore where wind speeds tend to be high and more consistent than onshore. This is where the largest and most economical turbine models tend to be used. By contrast, almost 99% of Japan’s wind power capacity is still onshore. A cumulative total of only 51.6 MW of offshore wind capacity was installed at the end of 2021 while total installed wind power capacity was 4.6 GW. Meanwhile the UK had 24.7 GW of wind power capacity, Spain 27.1 GW and Germany 62.2 GW. China is in a league of its own with 282 GW, more than all of Europe combined. Japan’s installed wind power base is less than that of small European countries such as Belgium (4.7 GW) that have relatively short coast lines and tiny EEZs: Japan’s EEZ of 4,479,388 km2 is over 1000 times larger than Belgium’s at 3,447 km2!

Japan is really only starting to build up offshore wind capacity, with projects off the coasts of Akita, Chiba and Nagasaki getting under way in the last two years. By 2030 its goal is for 10 GW of offshore capacity either installed or under construction which is still tiny compared to the already installed base of Germany, Spain or the UK.

Unlike fossil fuel or nuclear power stations, wind turbines are not location independent. They will be installed where wind conditions are favourable, where the sea is not too deep and connections to the coastal grid are cost-effective. To make the most of the wind conditions, the grid will need to be greatly expanded to allow large amounts of power to be transferred from regions with plenty of wind to regions with many consumers. This will be quite different from the current model where utility companies try to generate all the power they need within their own region, which is why there is only limited interchange capacity to help out if one company loses a large part of its generating capacity as happened in the recent quake or after 3/11.

Japan needs to start building high capacity long distance HVDC power lines like China has in order to enable a transition to zero carbon electricity. The fragmented power markets dominated by local utility companies are an obstacle to this transition as the interests of the regional companies seeking profits from existing investments in their area are not aligned with the interests of the consumers who want reliable green energy regardless of where it comes from.

Japan quickly needs to remove regulatory obstacles to expanding wind power and then invest to build a HVDC backbone to connect renewable power generation with consumers.

Reiwa Shinsengumi and Putin

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On February 28, 2022 the Japanese left-wing populist opposition party Reiwa Shinsengumi led by actor turned politician Yamamoto Taro refused to support a resolution by the Japanese Diet to condemn the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.

LDP politician Kono Taro wrote on twitter the next day:

Parliamentary Resolution to denounce the invasion of Ukraine by Russia was passed in the House of Representatives. Surprisingly, the three Reiwa Shinsengumi members voted against the Resolution.

I was curious why they would refuse to join an anti-war resolution and checked their party website.

What I found there was a statement that repeated a Putin talking point, blaming the war on NATO expansion into eastern Europe that supposedly violated a promise made to the Soviet Union not to admit now members from the former Soviet bloc:

今回の惨事を生み出したのはロシアの暴走、という一点張りではなく、
米欧主要国がソ連邦崩壊時の約束であるNATO東方拡大せず、を反故にしてきたことなどに目を向け、この戦争を終わらせるための真摯な外交的努力を行う
(“We don’t want to make the blanket statement that it was Russia’s outburst that created the current catastrophe.
Make a sincere diplomatic effort to end this war, focusing on the fact that the U.S. and major European countries have reneged on their promises made at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union not to expand NATO eastward.”)
(【声明】ロシアによるウクライナ侵略を非難する決議について（れいわ新選組 2022年2月28日）, 2022-02-18)

This Putin talking point that has been repeated by Russian propagandists over and over seeks to repaint the violent assault on a neighbour country as an act of self-defense. It is revisionist history and has been widely discredited as a myth. No such promise was ever made and Russia has not provided any evidence for its claim.

According to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, there was no such agreement. What did happen was that during the negotiations leading up to the reunification of Germany western powers agreed not to deploy NATO troops other than troops from Germany itself into parts of the former GDR (East Germany) once Germany was unified. NATO countries have kept this promise to this present day.

Admission of new NATO members was a subject not even talked about back in 1990. As sovereign nations, it is the right of former Warsaw pact states to apply for NATO membership just as it is the right of NATO members to accept or reject their applications to this mutual defense treaty. After the annexation of Crimea and support for a separatist war in eastern Ukraine by Russia it is now quite clear why eastern European countries have been seeking safety in numbers by wanting to join NATO.

Putin justifying his invasion of Ukraine by its desire to join NATO to keep him off is like a guy justifying the rape of a woman by her calling the police last time he beat her.

Frankly, I don’t expect anything better of Vladimir Putin who is more akin to a mobster than to a regular politician but I am disappointed by Reiwa Shinsengumi whom somehow I had expected to be on the side of democracy and human rights and not of a right-wing dictator.

Is Omicron milder than Delta?

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Early in the Omicron wave in South Africa some local doctors were commenting that they were seeing many “mild” cases of Omicron, quite different from what they had seen with Delta in the previous wave in the country.

Soon there were two competing takes on Omicron in the public discourse, one that concludes that Omicron is more like a bad cold and another that the true virulence of Omicron, even if it was somewhat lower, would matter less than the larger number of cases from its rapid spread. “A small percentage of a very large number can also be a large number,” is how many of the experts cautioned us.

The picture was further clouded by the fact that Omicron was spreading in parallel with Delta: Many of the countries that were seeing Omicron waves were already in the midst of a Delta wave connected to the onset of winter in the northern hemisphere. For example, Japan had cases growing about 20 percent week on week for several weeks before it saw significant numbers of confirmed Omicron cases. Many of the deaths seen while Omicron cases were already growing rapidly were still Delta cases.

Death numbers always lag a few weeks behind case numbers. For example, in Tokyo the average gap between Covid diagnosis and death is about 15 days. Then it takes another 16 days on average for the death to be reported in the evening news. This means, the death count reported in the media was from people who on average died 16 days ago after having a positive PCR test 31 days ago. The positive result of the PCR test would have been included in the daily count on average about 2-3 days after the test was taken.

There is some evidence that Omicron is less virulent than Delta. A study on hamsters showed that the variant seems less capable of infecting lung cells and seems to be more focussed on the nose, throat and windpipe, which may also contribute to its easier spread. It’s not clear how these animal study results translate to humans. In December, different numbers were reported for how much less virulent Omicron was overall or specifically for unvaccinated people, with risk reductions mentioned anywhere from 15 to 70 percent.

In any case, milder than Delta does not mean mild: Delta was worse than Alpha which was worse than the D614G strain that devastated Italy and New York city in March 2020, which was worse than the original Wuhan strain. Omicron may still be as bad as one of its pre-Delta ancestors, which were deadly enough.

Finally, we have some numbers coming in.

During the Delta wave the UK 7-day trailing count of deaths had reached a peak of around 1,200 in early November 2021, when almost 100% of cases were still Delta. On January 14, 2022, when most UK cases were Omicron, this had increased to about 1,800 deaths in the last 7 days, about 50 percent more deaths per week than at the peak of Delta.

The picture is similar in Canada, where 7-day deaths peaked at 344 in October with Delta. On January 15, 2022 the same metric reached 606, almost twice as deadly, with Omicron.

While the Case Fatality Rate (CFR), which is defined as the number of deaths divided by confirmed cases, has declined with Omicron relative to Delta, this is primarily because of the extraordinarily rapid growth of cases, which grew faster than deaths climbed. The CFR went down even as deaths increase. Thus Omicron can appear to be milder and not so mild after all, as it ends up killing more people per week than Delta did. If cases go up 5-fold but deaths “only” double, the CFR will fall by 60 percent.

The only saving grace may be that Omicron will most likely burn through the infectable population more quickly than Delta ever did. Cases have peaked in South Africa, the UK and most of the US. By February they will probably also peak in Japan (before I and most others can get a booster here).

Wear a good mask, if you meet people do it outdoors, ventilate, get vaccinated and get a booster if you can.

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Waiting for third doses in Japan

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In December, 470,000 medical workers, 280,000 seniors (65 and above) and 90,000 others in Tokyo were qualified to receive the 3rd dose because of the time interval since their second dose and their status. Only 63,292 (7.6%) of them actually received their dose. 1,829,880 booster doses were supplied by the central government. As for January, out of 620,000 qualified individuals, 29,645 (4.8%) have received their dose so far. The scheduled supply for this month is a further 1,702,800 doses for Tokyo, for an accumulated total of 3,532,680. The number of people eligible for boosters in Tokyo by the end of February is only 2,100,000.

Also, according to the Cabinet Office (kenbetsu-vaccination_data2.xlsx file), Tokyo had received 16,586,310 million doses of Pfizer for 1st/2nd shots in 2021, of which they have used 15,358,949 doses (92.60%). Therefore, about 1,227,361 Pfizer doses should still be have been available before any of the above mentioned supplies were delivered.

Nationwide, about 10 million doses of Pfizer have been supplied but not used (165,148,620 vs. 155,989,956). Of the 50,000,000 doses of Moderna that the central government had contracted for, 34,251,400 had been distributed and 31,938,353 actually used. That leaves about 18 million doses unused, which translates to 36 million booster shots, if you add 18 million sets of syringes (Moderna boosters are half doses of regular 1st/2nd doses).

It’s not a supply problem. Based on these numbers, it’s going to be something like a mere 120,000 people with a booster in Tokyo by the beginning of February, when literally millions could have received them. Meanwhile, new cases numbers (most of them Omicron) have been increasing 4 to 5-fold week on week. We will soon hit unprecedented numbers of cases.

Without a 3rd dose, two doses of Pfizer received 5 months ago offer little protection against symptomatic infection with Omicron, though they still reduce the risk of hospitalizations and other severe outcomes. This is because of the immunity escape from Omicron. Even two weeks after the second shot, efficacy is only a little over 60% with Omicron, significantly lower than with Delta. A third shot boosts efficacy to a slightly higher level than after the 2nd shot, winding the clock back by 6 months or more. Accelerating the booster campaign by using left-over vaccine doses as soon as possible should be a high priority.

Another important point is to improve the messaging on masks: Many people are still using simple masks that cover the face but do not fit particularly well. Mask policy in Japan is still not based on the recognition that Covid-19 is airborne disease that spreads via aerosols. One person can infect another without them being in the room at the same time. High grade masks like N95, KN95, KF94, FFP2 offer much better filtration because they reduce the unfiltered side stream. They offer the best first line of defense against the explosive spread of Omicron. A rapid roll-out of boosters should be the second line.

Numbers listed for all 47 prefectures in this MHLW document:
追加接種対象者数、接種回数及びワクチンの供給量 (“Number of subjects to be additionally vaccinated, number of times vaccinated, and quantity of vaccine supplied”, mhlw.go.jp)

Vaccination data by prefecture from Cabinet Office:
kenbetsu-vaccination_data2.xlsx (kantei.go.jp)