Today’s Asahi printed edition reports on pages 1 and 3 about renewable energy in Japan. There are some interesting facts in those reports.
For one, Marubeni is reported to build an 80 MW solar project in Oita, which will be the biggest in Japan to date. Marubeni is one of the largest Japanese general trading companies.
They plan to invest about 230 million euro, which would place their cost around 2,900 euro per kW of capacity. And they want to take until the end of 2013 to finish this project.
In contrast, a recent German 145 MW solar project was finished in five weeks.
Japan has still a lot of catching up to do before they can reach that speed of deployment.
Asahi also reports that the biggest share of the big solar projects are located in Hokkaido, the most northern part of Japan.
That doesn’t make much sense if one thinks only about solar resources. But it is much easier to secure the large areas needed for big projects in Hokkaido than in Tokyo.
