Japan has notoriously been dependent on energy imports, being the world’s fifth-largest crude importer and second-largest LNG importer (having lost the top position to China last year). Its self-sufficiency ratio dropped substantially after the 2011 Fukushima incident, from some 20% to 7-8%. Even though Tokyo did manage to hew off a couple of percentage points from its import dependence (around 12% by 2020), this was largely done by means of curbing energy consumption and rendering it more energy efficient. It is against this background that Japan started to make its first steps towards an all-encompassing renewables policy, going beyond the first pioneering projects that might have showed the way forward for Tokyo. Wind energy has so far been underrepresented in Japan’s energy matrix, however a slew of recent developments could portend a solid future for wind farms along the Japanese coast. The share of renewables sources in Japan’s total […]