Japan Sees a Chance to Promote Its Energy-Frugal Ways

[Dover]

A view through a window looking onto a commercial complex in Chiba, Japan, that uses transparent solar panels on window glass to generate power.


Japan Sees a Chance to Promote Its Energy-Frugal Ways

KUMAGAYA, Japan — With its towering furnaces and clanging conveyer belts carrying crushed rock, Taiheiyo Cement’s factory looks like an Industrial Revolution relic. But it is actually a model of modern energy efficiency, harnessing its waste heat to generate much of its own electricity.

Engineers from China and elsewhere in Asia come to study its design, which has allowed the company to slash the amount of power it buys from the grid.

The plant is just one example of Japan’s single-minded dedication to reducing energy use, a commitment that dates back to the oil shocks of the 1970s that shook this resource-poor nation.

Now, with oil prices hitting dizzying levels and the world struggling with global warming, the country is hoping to use its conservation record to take a rare leadership role on a pressing global issue. It will showcase its efforts to export its conservation ethic — and its expensive power-saving technology — at next week’s meeting in Japan of the Group of 8 industrial leaders.

“Superior technology and a national spirit of avoiding waste give Japan the world’s most energy-efficient structure,” Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said in a speech outlining his agenda for the meeting. Japan “wants to contribute to the world,” he said...cont'd

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/world/asia/04japan.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin

[Dogmudgeon]

1. "Superior technology and a national spirit of avoiding waste"

The rich get the Superior Technology.

Everybody else gets the National Spirit of Avoiding Waste.

Gee ... it's win-win!

--p!

[kristopher]

2. You don't know what you're talking about.

Japan has one of the most egalitarian cultures on Earth with around 99% of the people self-identifying as being in the economic "middle class".
It is still the norm for the president of a major corporation to earn only 20X the salary of the lowest employee in the company.

Frugality is a way of life that goes hand in hand with a rugged country lacking natural mineral resources and tillable land. You'd do well to emulate the Japanese rather than sneer at them.

[kristopher]

3. A little meat from the article

Japan is by many measures the world’s most energy-frugal developed nation. After the energy crises of the 1970s, the country forced itself to conserve with government-mandated energy-efficiency targets and steep taxes on petroleum. Energy experts also credit a national consensus on the need to consume less.

It is also the only industrial country that sustained government investment in energy research even when energy became cheap again.

“Japan taught itself decade s ago how to compete with gasoline at $4 per gallon,” said Hisakazu Tsujimoto of the Energy Conservation Center, a government research institute that promotes energy efficiency. “It will fare better than other countries in the new era of high energy costs.”

According to the International Energy Agency, based in Paris, Japan consumed half as much energy per dollar worth of economic activity as the European Union or the United States, and one-eighth as much as China and India in 2005. While the country is known for green products like hybrid cars, most of its efficiency gains have been in less eye-catching areas, for example, in manufacturing.

Corporate Japan has managed to keep its overall annual energy consumption unchanged at the equivalent of a little more than a billion barrels of oil since the early 1970s, according to Economy Ministry data. It was able to maintain that level even as the economy doubled in size during the country’s boom years of the 1970s and ’80s.

Japan’s strides in efficiency are clearest in heavy industries like steel, which are the nation’s biggest consumers of power. From 1972 to 2006, the Japanese steel industry invested about $45 billion in developing energy-saving technologies, according to the Japan Iron and Steel Federation...