I'm sure you saw this- but it seemed apropos of the discussion on oil:
Japan Squeezes to Get the Most of Costly Fuel
By JAMES BROOKE
Published: June 4, 2005
TOKYO, June 3 - Surging oil prices and growing concerns about meeting targets to cut greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels have revived efforts around the world to improve energy efficiency. But perhaps nowhere is the interest greater than here in Japan.
The Three-Liter House
Even though Japan is already among the most frugal countries in the world, the government recently introduced a national campaign, urging the Japanese to replace their older appliances and buy hybrid vehicles, all part of a patriotic effort to save energy and fight global warming. And big companies are jumping on the bandwagon, counting on the moves to increase sales of their latest models.
On the Matsushita appliance showroom floor these days, the numbers scream not the low, low yen prices, but the low, low kilowatt-hours.
A vacuum-insulated refrigerator, which comes with a buzzer if the door stays open more than 30 seconds, boasts that it will use 160 kilowatt-hours a year, one-eighth of that needed by standard models a decade ago. An air-conditioner with a robotic dust filter cleaner proclaims it uses 884 kilowatt-hours, less than half of what decade-old ones consumed.
"It's like squeezing a dry towel" for the last few drips, said Katsumi Tomita, an environmental planner for the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, maker of the Panasonic brand and known for its attention to energy efficiency. "The honest feeling of Japanese people is, 'How can we do more?' "
A number of other affluent countries with few domestic energy resources of their own are responding in similar ways.
In Germany, where heating accounts for the largest share of home energy use, a new energy saving law has as its standard the "seven-liter house," designed to use just seven liters of oil to heat one square meter for a year, about one-third the amount consumed by a house built in 1973, before the first oil price shock. Three-liter houses - even one-liter designs - are now being built.
In Singapore, where year-round air-conditioning often accounts for 60 percent of a building's power bill, new codes are encouraging the use of things like heat-blocking window films and hookups to neighborhood cooling systems, where water is chilled overnight.
In Hong Kong, many more buildings now have "intelligent" elevator systems in which computers minimize unnecessary stops. Parking restrictions encourage bus and rail transit, and authorities are also pushing hybrid cars equipped with engines that shut down when idling.
Other countries, including the United States, the world's largest energy consumer by far, have lagged behind, but even American consumers are starting to turn their backs on big sport utility vehicles and looking at more fuel-efficient cars in response to higher gasoline prices.
But Japan is where energy consciousness probably reaches the highest levels. The country has the world's second-largest economy, but it produces virtually no oil or gas, importing 96 percent of its energy needs.
This dependence on imports has prodded the nation into tremendous achievements in improved efficiency. France and Germany, where government crusades against global warming have become increasingly loud, expend almost 50 percent more energy to produce the equivalent of $1 in economic activity. Britain's energy use, on the same measure, is nearly double; the United States nearly triple; and China almost eight times as much.
From 1973 to today, Japan's industrial sector nearly tripled its output, but kept its energy consumption roughly flat. To produce the same industrial output as Japan, China consumes 11.5 times the energy.
At JFE Holdings, Japan's second-largest steel company, plastic pellets made from recycled bottles now account for 10 percent of fuel in the main blast furnaces, reducing reliance on imported coal. Japanese paper mills are investing heavily in boilers that can be fueled by waste paper, wood and plastic. Within two years, half of the electricity used in the nation's paper mills is to come from burning waste.
Many easy steps were taken after the oil shocks of the 1970's. Now Japan is embarking on a new phase. Billions of dollars are being invested to reach a 2012 target of reducing Japan's emission of global warming gases to 6 percent below the 1990 level. These gases are released by burning oil, coal, and, to a lesser extent, natural gas - sources for about 81 percent of Japan's energy.
As host nation for the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gases, Japan takes its commitment seriously. But it faces a big challenge. Figures released last month show Japan was 8.3 percent over the 1990 level for the fiscal year ended March 2004.
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The Three-Liter House
Is a Salaryman Without a Suit Like Sushi Without the Rice? (May 20, 2005) "We are now at the stage where we only save energy by investing in equipment," Mr. Tomita said of Matsushita's effort. "If we can collect money in three years, we invest."
With the Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, introducing its national campaign two months ago to meet the Kyoto targets, business is booming for energy service companies and consultants who advise companies on cutting energy bills.
But Japan's flattening of industrial energy consumption has not been matched in the transportation and residential sectors, where energy consumption has more than doubled since 1973, roughly pacing Japan's economic growth over the period.
Japan may be a mass transit nation, but now there is also a car for almost every Japanese household. Since 1970, the number of buses in Japan increased 23 percent, the number of trucks doubled, and the number of passenger cars increased more than sixfold, to 56 million.
With personal use accounting for the bulk of April's $6.4 billion bill for imported oil, Tokyo is trying to encourage greater efficiency by pushing fuel taxes even higher, lifting the pump price for gasoline to $4.70 a gallon, the highest in a decade.
During the 1990's, Japan's average fuel consumption per mile fell 13 percent. But since then, with more Japanese driving bigger cars, fuel efficiency growth has stalled.
Japan finds hope in the history of its refrigerators, which have doubled in size since 1981 as their energy use per liter has plunged 80 percent.
In hopes of working the same engineering magic on cars, Japan has extended its minicar tax breaks to hybrid cars - fuel-efficient vehicles that rely on a combination of a gasoline engine and an electric motor. Hybrid sales, while still relatively low in Japan, are growing fast. And in this environment, Toyota and Honda have become the world leaders in hybrid technology.
"We're entering the age of hybrid automobiles," Hiroyuki Watanabe, Toyota's senior managing director for environmental affairs, recently told journalists at the 2005 World Exposition Aichi, in Nagoya. "I want every car to have a hybrid engine."
The next energy-savings battleground is the home front.
After $1.3 billion in subsidies, about 160,000 homes have solar power systems. Solar power remains two to three times as expensive as the electricity supplied to households. But homeowners say that with time, the "free" electricity pays for the high installation costs. And the government is willing to devote taxes to the effort, preferring to spur rural employment through solar power installations to help reduce payments for foreign oil, coal and gas.
Although residential subsidies may be phased out, a Japanese government plan calls for increasing solar power generation 15-fold during this decade.
Japanese companies, notably Sharp, Kyocera, Mitsubishi and Sanyo, produce about half the world's photovoltaic solar panels, a roughly $10-billion-a-year market. With large commercial projects like a 4,740-panel generator going online at a filtration plant in Nara last month, Japan produces more than the combined total of the next biggest, Germany and the United States.
Prime Minister Koizumi is a political conservative who believes that saving oil starts at home. Visitors to his official residence here walk past a boxy hydrogen fuel-cell generator, a prototype installed by Matsushita in April to power the residence and educate the nation's leadership.
"Fuel cells are the key to the door of a new era in which we utilize hydrogen as an energy source," Mr. Koizumi told Parliament in 2002. "We intend to put them into practical use within three years, either as power sources for automobiles or households."
His government has set goals for cutting power consumption even further for the four main household appliances: televisions, 17 percent; personal computers, 30 percent; air- conditioners, 36 percent; and refrigerators, 72 percent. Engineers have been attacking the problem of the power used by appliances on standby, a drainage that can account for 5 percent to 10 percent of a household's energy consumption.
Still, while energy efficiency is seen as a patriotic act, many consumers in Japan are reluctant to part with working appliances, made with the Japanese ingenuity and attention to detail that ensure they will last for decades.
"The problem we are facing is over how much we induce consumers to trade in their appliances for more energy-efficient ones," Hajimi Sasaki, chairman of the NEC Corporation, a major appliance maker, said in April at a news conference billed as "Proposals Aimed at Overcoming Global Warming."
"I drive a hybrid car, and last fall I put heat-cutting film on some of our windows," he said. "And I intend to buy a new refrigerator." |
