If Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan's rooftop solar proposal can get past a hold-up in parliament, it could mean a market for $260 billion in the production and installation of solar panels. The need for 8 gigawatts of backup batteries would make for big business, too. Risa Maeda and Leonora Walet write:
Solar is one of the power sources the government of the world's third-largest economy is focusing on after the March earthquake and tsunami shattered Tokyo's nuclear-dependent energy policy. ...
Prime Minister Naoto Kan, facing criticism over his handling of the crisis and struggling for his political survival, in May announced a plan that would put solar panels on some 10 million roofs by 2030. The announcement cheered investors, but the government has so far failed to follow through. ...
Solar power could jack up consumers' bills by a third in a scenario where 30 gigawatts of solar rooftop panels are deployed along areas served by Tokyo Electric Power Co, said University of Tokyo assistant professor Ryoichi Komiyama.
He said if this scheme went ahead it would create a market for 21 trillion yen ($261 billion) of solar panel production and installation.
Large-scale solar plants also need batteries and back-up power plants to smooth erratic supply. Komiyama said his scenario for the 30 gigawatt potential includes solar developers spending 2 trillion yen for 8 gigawatt of batteries.
Nationally, an estimate by the environment ministry showed the potential for commercial solar projects, regardless of economic feasibility, could theoretically reach 150 gigawatts, about 10 times the capacity of the world's biggest solar market Germany. That would also be equivalent to 60 percent of Japan's existing power generation capacity. ...
At Daily Kos on this date in 2005:
For months, President Bush has struggled to maintain public support for the war in Iraq in the face of periodic setbacks on the battlefield. Now he faces a second front in the battle for public opinion: charges that the administration is not telling the truth about how the war is going.
Bush and his aides have delivered a positive, if carefully calibrated, message. The war is not yet won, they acknowledge, but steady progress is being made. "We can expect more tough fighting in the weeks and months ahead," the president said in his weekly radio address Saturday. "Yet I am confident in the outcome."
But last month, Vice President Dick Cheney broke from the administration's "message discipline" and declared that the insurgency was in its "last throes." The White House has been paying a price ever since.
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who supported the decision to go to war in Iraq, complained that the White House was "completely disconnected from reality." Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), another supporter of the war, charged that Bush had opened not just a credibility gap, but a "credibility chasm."
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