Japanese Feed-In Tariff Updates

Reposted from Lenz Blog with permission:

On Friday, the Japanese Ministry of Economy and Industry decided to follow the recommendations of the expert committee I reported on earlier. It’s now official. Small rooftop solar will get 38 yen (around 40.3 cents U.S or 31.5 cents Euro at today’s rates), and everything over 10 kW capacity will get 37.8 yen, including the 5% value added tax (36 yen without tax).

Thanks to this tweet by Hiro Matsubara for the link.

Everything else will get the same rates as last year. There have been no changes from the recommendations of the expert committee.

The decision also sets the surcharge for next year at 0.40 yen a kWh, which works out to about 120 yen (about one euro at today’s rates) a month for the average consumer.

The reason that the surcharges are still so small even when the rates are set much higher as in Germany is simply that Japan has just started out with the deployment of renewable energy. With a very small percentage of the market the surcharges naturally will stay small for some time to come.

Update: Leading Japanese renewable expert Keiichiro Sakurai kindly points out in a comment that the feed-in tariff for rooftop solar is paid only for electricity actually sold to the grid. There is no feed-in tariff for electricity people consume themselves. That of course means that for that part of generated electricity people only profit from reducing their electricity bill. It also means an incentive to reduce self-consumption, since the feed-in tariff is still higher than the electricity price charged by TEPCO (18.89 per kWh for the first 120 kWh per month,  25.19 yen for everything above and under 300 kWh per month, and 29.10 for every kWh above 300 kWh per month).