Akihabara News (Tokyo) — In October 2020, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga made a pledge to make Japan carbon neutral by 2050. In just the last year, this new target has energized Japan’s fledgling hydrogen production industry as corporate leaders rush to get ahead of the new wave of innovation.
While Japan was an early leader in hydrogen power in the 1970s, high costs made the industry less profitable than fossil fuel energy, causing development to stall. Now Japan is embracing a new era of clean energy.
In one of the latest moves from a major Japanese firm, Panasonic is developing what could be the world’s first hydrogen plant powered completely by renewable energy in Kusatsu, Shiga Prefecture. This plant is expected to utilize a combination of lithium ion storage batteries and solar panels, as well as larger fuel cells that can convert hydrogen into electricity.
Panasonic hopes to sell this hydrogen-power system commercially in the global market by 2023.
Not far from Panasonic’s plant, Toyota, which has a carbon zero target set for 2035, is creating hydrogen-powered Mirai cars at its factory in Aichi prefecture. Last year, Toyota partnered with multiple hydrogen producers to create fuel cell systems for cars, trains, and other vehicles.
These recent innovations haven’t been entirely due to private investment; the Japanese government has put a huge amount of funding into green energy in Japan. Last year alone, the government invested ¥2 trillion (US$18.3 billion) in renewable energy and green technologies in order to meet its 2050 carbon neutral goal.
However, smaller corporations are having difficulty handling the costs of switching to hydrogen, leading some to push for significantly greater government assistance.
While the costs of hydrogen energy continue to be much higher than fossil fuel, increasing government investment could push a rapid change in the next decades.
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