Innovations to Reduce Demand for Power

Among the specific innovations on the demand side are smart buildings and houses with smart meters installed. They would draw electricity from a smart power grid and be located in smart cities. The development and diffusion of such innovations should be carried out at an accelerated pace.

A prototype “smart house” located in the Yokohama Minato Mirai 21 district. (Photo: Sekisui House, Ltd.)
Panasonic has teamed up with the city of Fujisawa in Kanagawa Prefecture and eight other companies for the Fujisawa SST project to build a “smart town” on a 19-hectare plot of land that was once the site of the company’s factory. (Photo: Panasonic Corp.)
Interior of a type of house that prioritizes concern for the environment while integrating network technologies. The aim is to explore new styles of amenable living in houses constructed for long-term use. (Photo: Sekisui House, Ltd.)
The Ōya Stone Museum built of an abandoned underground mine in Utsunomiya, Tochigi Prefecture. Other areas of Japan are considering the possibilities for taking advantage of the natural cooling of such underground areas, which makes them ideal locations for data centers and servers.
The Inujima Art Project Seirensho; a museum that preserves and revives the remains of a copper refinery on the island. The building makes use of the refinery’s smokestacks and its “karami” bricks created as a byproduct of the refining process, while also utilizing natural sources of energy such as solar and geothermal power. (Photo: Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation)
Artwork: Yanagi Yukinori
Architectural design: Sambuichi Hiroshi
Administration: Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation
Photography: Ano Daici

There is much room for improvement in the efficiency of heating, cooling, and lighting in Japanese offices and homes. Just attaching sensors equipped with intelligent functions would be extremely helpful. By piling up small innovations, including the rearrangement of office layouts and installation of light reflectors, an unrivaled level of energy saving can be achieved. The cooling of computer servers, which are now expanding exponentially, is an area where much can still be done by making the most of the technologies accumulated up to now, including sophisticated sensors and local-cooling devices. The tasks of refining sensor technologies, building local heating and cooling equipment, and developing new materials are in fact made to order for Japanese manufacturing.

From the viewpoint of dispersing risks, it will be best not to concentrate in just a few locations the data centers that house huge numbers of servers. Some of them might be moved to subterranean caverns on the islands of Hokkaidō and Kyūshū and in the Chūgoku region of western Honshū. Maximum use should also be made of energy-saving technologies for constructing buildings. An example of what is possible can be seen on the island of Inujima in the Seto Inland Sea, where structures have been built that make use of the natural power of light and wind. Japan’s famed expertise at making things is likely to demonstrate its potency in this area too. Indeed, coming up with demand-side innovations is something at which Japan excels. And the technologies devised in Japan can be exported directly to emerging countries and other parts of the world.

Nonetheless, even after being informed of such possibilities, people who think according to the old paradigm may still find it hard to appreciate the need to abandon nuclear power. Japan will not have much of a future, however, unless it can put major and minor innovations to use to end its reliance on nuclear power, which currently supplies on average about 30% of Japan’s electricity. Matsushita Kōnosuke, the founder of Panasonic Corp., once remarked that while cutting costs by 3% is difficult, cutting them by 30% is not that hard. And his company apparently accomplished that feat. What he meant is that breakthrough innovations will not be realized if engineers set their sights on a 3% target, which can be attained merely by taking existing technologies one step forward; but when the target is a 30% improvement, engineers are motivated to pursue completely new lines of thinking. Seen in this light, 30% is not an impossible goal to pursue.