About twenty geothermal power plants are in operation at 17 locations nationwide, scattered all along the country. Most are located in the Tohoku and Kyushu districts. In these years, there have not been significant developments of geothermal power plants in Japan, with the exception of two small binary units, in Hatchobaru and Kirishima Kokusai Hotel: A 2 MWe power unit was established at the Hatchobaru geothermal power station in February 2004, and started its operation in April 2006. And a 220 kW domestic binary geothermal power unit started its operation at the Kirishima Kokusai Hotel in August 2006.

Total geothermal power capacity in Japan has changed little since 1995. No new plants are planned in the coming years. It is very clear the effect on the production of the reduction in the investment in power plant and field maintenance. Geothermal energy needs a continuous effort for ensuring sustainable cultivation of the resource!

Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS)
In April 2003, the Special Law Concerning the Use of Renewable Energy by Electric Utilities came into force, establishing a renewable portfolio standard (RPS) system in Japan. The RPS system is intended to accelerate further development of renewable energy sources by requiring the electric power utilities to supply electricity generated from renewable energies with a target amount specified by the government in proportion to their total electricity sales.
The Japanese Government has set the target to be 12,200 GWh (1.35% of total electricity) by 2010 and 16,000 GWh (1.65% of total) by 2014.
The renewable energy sources included in the RPS system are solar, wind, hydroelectric (1,000 kWe or less), biomass and geothermal. For geothermal, however, practically only binarycycle power plants are applicable to the RPS system.

A committee was established in 2008 in the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) with members from power producers, geothermal resources developers to promote further geothermal power generation. Major discussions in the committee include: 1) inclusion of all types of geothermal power generation in the RPS system, which currently only applies to binary cycle plants in geothermal sectors, and 2) increase of governmental subsidies to construction costs of geothermal power plants. Japan will soon resume its development of geothermal power plants in order to realize a low-carbon society.
 

Although many hotels and Japanese-style inns utilize hot spring water, this bathing utilization has been excluded in past reports and was only estimated by the authors (Freeston and Lund) for WGC2005, mainly as it is difficult to evaluate the actual use. However, to be consistent with reports from other countries and the world-wide summary, the numbers for bathing and swimming are included in this report.

The total capacity without bathing has not changed much from WGC2005. Bathing now accounts for about 90% of the utilization in the country for direct-use. Since 2002, 141 new direct-use facilities has been added to the database, while 136 facilities were removed of which 58 facilities were dismantled or stopped operating due to economic problems, switching to oil or corrosion/scaling problems.

The various applications are as follows:

77.37 MWt and 969.49 TJ/yr for space heating;
36.92 MWt and 451.73TJ/yr for greenhouse heating;
7.91 MWt and 141.86 TJ/yr for fish farming,
1.24 MWt and 30.92 TJ/yr for industrial applications;
152.54 MWt and 516.27 TJ/yr for air conditioning and snow melting (assuming a 30% - 70% split as for WGC2005);
1,810.19 MWt and 23,519.81 TJ/yr for bathing and swimming;
13.36 MWt and 67.86 TJ/yr for geothermal heat pumps.

The total is 2,099.53 MWt and 25,697.94 TJ/yr