Cost against emissions reduction survey says 5 per cent

• 14 years ago (2010-03-12)
• David Flin

Asia 846 Nuclear 639

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A survey conducted on electricity consumers in Japan revealed that more than half the respondents were not willing to accept price increases exceeding 5 per cent to reduce CO2 emissions. When asked about acceptable rates of increase in electricity prices for different types of power sources, the consumers’ acceptable levels for renewable energy sources were comparatively high (4-8 per cent), while those for nuclear energy were around 2 per cent.

The survey was conducted by the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (CRIEPI). An analysis was made based on 7492 responses obtained from residential, commercial and industrial electricity consumers. The responses from commercial and industrial consumers showed relatively small differences in the acceptable rates of price increase between different energy sources. On the other hand, the rate of price increase acceptable to residential consumers for electricity generated with renewable energy sources was found to be about four times higher than that for nuclear power. CRIEPI suspects that the reason behind this result is that residential electricity consumers “may have the impression that nuclear power generation produces more CO2 than renewable energies.”

While introducing a large amount of renewable energy generated electricity may involve the risk of negatively affecting power systems are deteriorating the quality of electricity, the survey result showed that many respondents “would not accept the degradation of electricity quality below current levels, including the occurrence of power outages.”