Tokyo faces blackout a week after quake shut power stations
Businesses and residents asked to conserve energy as cold snap hits world’s biggest metropolitan sprawl
Tokyo businesses and residents have been told to limit their use of electricity or risk plunging the world’s biggest metropolitan sprawl into a blackout on Tuesday evening.
The warning, which affects the capital as well as surrounding areas that are home to about 45mn people, follows a violent earthquake in north-eastern Japan last week that caused several thermal power plants to suspend operations. It also piled pressure on a grid already strained by the 11-year closure of most of the country’s nuclear facilities.
The blackout alert, which was issued by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, is the first of its type since a system was installed in the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku quake.
The area affected is covered by the Tokyo Electric Power Company, known as Tepco, whose reputation remains tarnished by the 2011 meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear power facility. Later on Tuesday, a second warning was issued to areas covered by the Tohoku Electric Power Company in the north-east of the country.
The warning sets up a challenge for both companies and individual homes to collectively cut their consumption by about 60mn kilowatt-hours, or around 10 per cent of the estimated demand from 8am to 11pm.
The alarm was sounded after power reserves fell below 3 per cent of total capacity. Between 11am and noon, the ratio of demand to power supply capacity hit 103 per cent, the highest of four levels of severity, according to Tepco.
Koichi Hagiuda, the trade minister, called for co-operation to save electricity “as much as possible”, saying that the supply of electricity was expected to be extremely tight.
The power crunch has coincided with unusually cold weather around Tokyo, with snow forecast for Tuesday afternoon.
On the night of last week’s 7.4 magnitude quake, more than 2mn homes across nine prefectures, including Tokyo, suffered power cuts that in some cases lasted until the following day. The quake initially forced more than 6 gigawatts of power capacity to go offline, of which roughly half remains suspended, according to the government.
Even before last week’s quake, which caused three deaths and 225 injuries, senior policymakers within the ruling Liberal Democratic party had privately discussed the need for a “national drive” to convince people to use less electricity as the Russian invasion of Ukraine drove up global energy prices.
Yuriy Humber, founder of energy consultancy Japan NRG, said the warning was a reminder of Japan’s heavy reliance on thermal energy, mostly coal and gas.
“I’m a bit surprised as to how prolonged this is likely to be,” said Humber, who added that the prospect of asking the world’s oldest population to conserve power was something the government would be keen to avoid in an election year.
The fact that the alert had been issued, he said, suggested that the damage done by last week’s tremors could be greater than acknowledged.