TOKYO, Aug. 11, 2023—They are not isolated scandals. Not only national lawmakers but local assembly persons smell money in Japan’s renewable energy businesses. So they woo and snuggle up to renewable energy companies while others craft startups for fat government subsidies.
On Aug. 5, 2023, Masatoshi Akimoto, a Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker who had espoused nuclear power free energy policy by serving as the party’s environmental commission, abruptly left the ruling party amid reports of prosecutor investigation of his alleged bribes from a window power firm, in a scandal that is believed to involve more politicians.
To date, neither Nashimoto nor his LDP leader and prime minister, Fumio Kishida, said they would hold a news conference on his bribery acceptance from Japan Wind Development Co., a 100 million yen company that Masayuki Tsukawaki, a former Mitsui & Co. employee, started in 1999. In 2013, the Ministry of the Environment announced giving 4.2 billion yen to JWD for building and experimenting a multiple number of wind power facilities, a few months after he was first elected to the House of Representatives. The project has basically flopped for mechanical defects, noise complaints from residents, bird strikes and other reasons.
In the central prefecture of Nagano, a local building material maker, Seyano Co., Aug. 9 filed for bankruptcy with 6.5 billion yen debt for multiyear liabilities it had incurred for running the ‘F. Power’ project, a biomass generation facility.
Watahan Holdings Co., the local supermarket chain, is expected to acquire the failed company, probably excluding F. Power.
F. Power was trumpeted by the prefecture government, the city of Shiojiri (population 25,000), local forestry associations, and Seyano in 2012, and the facility began operating in 2020 for power generation and wood processing. Even at the time when the project was incubated and revealed to the public in 2012, forestry professionals expressed lukewarm opinions.
‘The single biggest issue then – and even now – was how to secure wood to burn in the incinerator to generate power on a sustainable basis,’ Kanji Sadanari, a former head of a local forestry management alliance told me Aug. 11. ‘Bringing waste wood (such as branches that cannot be processed into lumber) to the furnace from the local forests was not enough at all, so it had to buy from other areas by driving large trucks for hours. It didn’t make sense from the beginning.’
Sadanari thought that despite all kinds of shortcomings, (prefecture government) officials (assembly members and prefecture bureaucrats) railroaded the project ‘for their interest. It’s the reason why, despite the large amount of debt (for Nagano), that small company’s (Seyano) name is cited in news articles.’
Sadanari said that most of F. Project’s budget was financed with prefecture subsidies all through the years, the reason why the debt ha become an outsize sum for the small prefecture.
Wind, biomass, solar farm power generation in Japan does not go a long way without government subsidies, and that is where lawmakers and bureaucrats intervene to build their interest, be it as bribery or (many unnecessary) administrative work.
###