Citizen Renewable Energy Seminar in Kiso, Nagano (Vol. 1) [Call companions from all over the world]

 Every month, we have a citizen renewable energy seminar in Flat Kiso, a co-working space in Kiso Town, Nagano, Japan. This seminar started from September, 2020. In September, the topic is "Renewable energy use from ancient times and photovoltaic power generation".

  In Japan, renewable energy power generation plants have increased drastically from 2012 because of FIT (feed-in tariff). It is a successful policy to promote renewable energy power generation in Europe, especially in Germany from 1990s. This policy began to enforce in Japan from July 2012. This policy has promoted renewable energy generation in Japan, especially photovoltaic power. On the other hand, the construction of renewable energy power plant led to lots of environmental problems in Japan.

 In Japan, more than half of the land is covered by mountain. The photovoltaic power plant in Japan can not be built in desert area, like U.S or China. The usable land for photovoltaic power plant construction in Japan is limited and small-scale. In principle, it is difficult to built large-scale photovoltaic power plant. But power generation companies in Japan cut a large amount of forest for building large-scale photovoltaic power plants, because of big economic benefit from FIT.

（photo is from The Sankei News January 13, 2019 https://www.sankei.com/life/news/190113/lif1901130029-n1.html 2020/10/27)

 In many cases, power generation companies built power plants on steep slopes. These plants led to landslide easily, especially during rainy season or typhoon season. In fact, widespread landslide happened on the sites of photovoltaic power generation plants, during rainy season in 2019. A large amount of solar panels were damaged. Photovoltaic power generation plants became a factor leading to landslide in Japan. Thus, a lot of local movements against photovoltaic power generation occurred around Japan. 

（photo is from The Sankei News July 27, 2018  https://www.sankei.com/west/news/180727/wst1807270048-n1.html 2020/10/27)

For many people who live far away from photovoltaic power generation plants, they confuse if photovoltaic power is a good resource or not. For people who live near the plants, many of them against photovoltaic power because of the risk of landslide, in many cases, they are not clear what is photovoltaic power. In order to help them to understand photovoltaic power, we started citizen renewable energy seminar. If you are interested in, please contact with zhenglvyun@gmail.com

We look forward your join.