With the continued discussion in the press as to the likelihood that Britain’s next generation of nuclear power will be built and at what cost it’s interesting to see hoe other countries with a nuclear dilemma are looking at alternative ways to plug the gap. I don’t think many will forget Fukushima, where a tsunami caused a nuclear disaster that caused the Japanese nuclear power station to close, and remain closed. Power stations of this size take a long time to design and build, the closure left a huge 30% deficit in generation capacity.

Japans answer; change the lightbulbs!

Since the 2012 event over 78 million LED light bulbs have been sold, and now represents almost 40% of all lighting sold in Japan. The impact of this and an adoption of solar PV and local battery storage has meant that the majority of this deficit has now been mitigated.

In 2014 the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to a Japanese national, Mr Hiroshi Amano, widely known as the investor the blur LED that led to LED lighting becoming commercially viable. Mr Amano believes that within 5 years Japan can reduce its annual energy spend by about $8.4 billion (1 trillion yen) purely by adopting more LED lighting.

The main driver for this stance by the Japanese government to increase LED uptake was due to research carried out by the Institute of Energy Economics in 2011. The research projected that adopting LED could lead to a 10% reduction in Japanese energy consumption, an annual total of 92.2 terawatt hours.