I'm so excited for our newest edition to our efforts to live a comfortable, cheap & sustainable life in Japan: more solar on the roof paired with a home battery 🪫
A few months ago as electricity was rising our bills were about ¥15,000-25,000/month and that is only going to keep going up. We have a 3kwh solar panel system on our roof when we first renovated the house and it cost ¥3,000,000, but with the government's FIT (Feed-in-tarriff) payback at a high rate for excess energy sold to our neighborhood via the grid, we actually paid it off in just 8 years!
Compared to 2010, the rooftop solar rates in the last few years are 1/3 the price we paid and home batteries are also coming down in price. So we invested in a new 4kwh solar array on the other side of the roof (best for afternoon sunshine) paired with a home battery system and an IH induction cooktop to replace an old gas one. Now I can also enjoy better air quality while cooking.
We will pay 25,000 yen per month for the next 10 years & then it's all free energy & storage 🙌 🎉
We are lucky to have permanent residency so we could get a loan over 10 years which helped us get a battery as well. I was saving up ¥1M to just get more solar on its own, but if you can save or borrow 2M you can now afford a battery + solar set.
Some early images from our app telling us real-time energy creation, usage and storage is really fun to see & I will update on our electric bill reductions when I get them.
Above you can see how in the middle of a sunny day in June were making 4.8kwh & the battery is fully charged so the excess after covering what were using goes to the grid for our neighbors to use. The local electric Co only gives us a few yen per kilowatt sold since the 10-year FIT incentive ended but I look forward to a payback of ¥1-2000 yen per month compared to our current ¥500/mo.
Before getting solar at all, our electric ⚡ rates on cold or hot months with a full house was ¥40,000/MO so even a little solar can help reduce bills.
Whenever I stand above my neighborhood, I could how many solar covered roofs there are & it seems to be at about 10% or 20 out of every 200 houses. This is in line with the national average of 10% of private homes and businesses in Japan with solar on the roof, but it should be a lot more.
Now our life, work and transportation is covered by sunshine 🌞 from our roof - so lovely 😍
Anti-China Solar Excuse
The current LDP government states it doesn't like solar because they don't want to import from China. Well, both of my systems actually come from Japan, but even if you import from China, the sunshine you make is here, so it's not a continuous dependency!
Contrast this to the fossil fuels Japan is overly-dependent on to fulfill most electrical needs. This import dependency on fossil fuel has been linked to a weak yen & prices of fossil fuels imports will never stop increasing.
Pro-Nuclear Power Excuse
The government is planning to heavily invest in bringing new nuclear power facilities back into use but.. they won't be online for 14 years! What?! For the amount of money spent on building nuclear power we can cover all new houses and business rooftops (exceptions for shade) in solar to start producing power right where & when it's needed.
In addition to improving quality of life for people and reducing environmental impact, more solar means more locally made energy power capacity. This could be a huge resource for Japan's economy as we are developing new semiconductor factories and data centers starting this year.
Japan also has big aims to significantly reduce it's GHG's (Green House Gas) by 2050 which is another reason we can't wait 14 years to embrace solar, wind and geo-thermal solutions we know work now.
The nice thing is we don't have to wait for government to do the right thing. If you have a roof, put some solar on it. If you don't have a sunny roof, you can source your energy from a 100% renewable energy broker like Minna-no-Denki or Hachidori Denryoku no matter where you live in Japan.
We have the solutions, we just need the will...
Rooftop Solar Checklist
✅ Saves money - price only decreases
✅ Provides clean energy you can use
✅ Self-sufficient energy if there's a power cut
✅ Subsidies available
✅ Helps 🌍