A very brief (all things are relative) response to Richard Katz's post from Sep 26:

RK: "According to the National Association of Energy and Water, nearly 40% (14,000 of the 36,000 megawatts) of NEW electricity generation capacity being planned for Germany will be fueled by coal."

1. There is new and then there is new. I apologize for not having figures at hand, but a lot of this "new"
capacity is new in the sense that it will get built, but it is not "new" in the sense of additional. In plain English, a lot of this "new" coal capacity is being built to replace aging capacity. This does not mean that there will be lots more MW of coal generation in Germany - it only means that old MW are getting replaced with new MW. It would be interesting to hear how much of these 14 GW are actually new and additional MW.

2. There is coal and then there is coal. What is the efficiency of these power plants? Old technology has figures in the 30s, newer in the 40s. Higher percentages mean lower greenhouse gas emissions per output. This can be diminished even further if the plant is CCS-ready. (Admittedly, there is not a single coal power plant with CCS operating commercially anywhere in the world. Toshiba has a CCS-ready design with an efficiency of 20%. Not a winner, so far.) The point is, emissions CAN go down even if you build new coal, as long as the new capacity is merely new, but not additional.

RK: "The feed-in-tariff for wind now requires customers to pay around 3 times the cost of conventional electricity."

The feed-in tariff is a technology support instrument.
What it is meant to do is to provide an acceptable return to investors within the instrument's coverage period, allowing them to get financing for the large capital expenses that "new energies" (to use Japanese
jargon) require. Thus, what consumers' money is used for is not electricity production per se, but an investment support spread out over a certain period of time. The level of the tariff is calculated to make the investors recoup their investment within that period.
Once it is recouped and the feed-in tariff for a given installation expires, the cost of the electricity from the given installations would be equal maintenance costs. Practically zero. I.e. free.

If you don't believe me, go visit Norway, which I just did. There you will find that electric utilities are scrambling to build transmission lines to Germany and Scotland, because they know that without them the upcoming wind, small-scale hydro and biomass is going to make the bottom fall out of the Nordic electricity market over the medium term, unless the excess electricity produced at zero marginal cost is shipped off somewhere.

The extra costs of renewables are undeniable. But some form of investment needs to happen anyway to keep any country's power system running into the future.
Expensive things need to get built one way or the other. Investing as much as sensibly possible into something clean and has zero marginal cost does not seem silly to me.

RK: "Biomass also releases huge amounts of global warming gases. In fact, some studies show that traditional biomass in developing countries may release more carbon　emissions than oil or coal."

There is a lot of truth here, but a bit more detail would be welcome. Biomass _is_ burning wood, dung, wood chips, waste, etc. Therefore it does emit CO2. However, biomass is renewable because the wood, dung, etc. also came from the atmosphere. The carbon accounting should (normative statement alert!) add up to zero. It does, if there is good governance. Given the sentence RK wrote, i cannot tell what he exactly referred to, but i suspect he gets his information from data about the disastrous carbon accounting of palm oil. You only get palm oil from palm plantations, and in places with poor governance the way you get palm plantations is through the deforestation of pristine rain forests. The amount of carbon released into the atmosphere through this turns the entire exercise into a sick joke. Therefore, i would warn anybody to use a big, big, BIG amount of salt when hearing that this or that place wants to meet their renewables obligation through biomass. It does not mean that it cannot be done (i hesitatingly put Sweden and Finland forward), but the governance apparatus for biomass is necessarily much more complex than for other forms of renewables.

RK: "What are the total costs of Germany's program and who pays them?"

If you do the math on those years and those GDP percentages mentioned by RK after this point, you get 1-2.5% GDP a year, not accounting for discount factors.
The days when i was doing macro are a long time ago, but could we get an economic historian here to tell us how much of GDP large-scale infrastructure overhauls take up? Is this really something that would break the bank? It would be interesting to know how these types of things are generally financed.

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Overall, i would like to say that for Japan now what is really important are these kinds of questions:

1. If coal-fired capacity will be built, what kind of technology is it really going to be? And will it be replacement-new or additional-new?
2. Who will pay for the necessary upgrades in transmission? This is necessary already now under a "conventional" energy system, as this summer's Kansai EPCO debacle showed, but if you add fluctuating-output renewables it is going to be unavoidable.
3. Who will pay for the balancing capacity? Will Japan get a capacity market?
4. What is the impact on electricity tariffs going to be once insurance for nuclear is taken into account?
This is an entirely different matter from clean-up costs.
5. When do we get the new safety standards online? And when, for the love of god, will we know how many nuclear power plants will come online?

Thank you, and sorry for the length.