A very informative piece in the Asia Times today - Wind drifts out of Japan's green vision. It makes the point that although Japan wrote the book on integrating solar pv and hosted the Kyoto Treaty, there's next to no interest in integrating wind power into the National Grid, at any real scale.  Compared to the ambitious targets most European countries and different States in the US have set themselves, Japan's goal of 1.63% production of energy from renewables by 2014 looks smaller than a piece of sushi.

The reasons for this slow uptake of wind are;

i) Japan's regional utility monopolies are demanding that any windfarm is connected to energy storage at the developers cost - tripling the installed cost per megawatt for onshore wind.
ii) In the recent past, Japan's big companies have heavily invested in solar and would rather see that home-grown technology succeed

That has not stopped though, japanese companies like Mitsubishi Heavy Industries selling turbines abroad. Still, you'd think this does not augur well for Japan Wind Development - our one and only Japanese wind play. Or does it?

The stock has bucked the trend of recent months, doubling in value since last December. As reported here not so long ago on Bloombergs, they have actually gone some way to adding battery storage, by teaming up with battery manufacturer, NGK Insulators. NGK's sodium-sulfur units cost a reported 294 million yen ($2.9 million) per megawatt. That's expensive, but the yield from battery-stored  wind electricity triples the buyout price for the power.

Battery-stored electricity is definitely a trend to watch out for in the years to come.