Wow! Here comes Setsuden-mushi.! Chapter 4 Birth of Setsuden-mushi 4.5 Standby Power Consumption 4.5.1.2 Annual electricity consumption and energy savings potential
http://www.stat.go.jp/data/sekai/pdf/0605.pdf (Data has become outdated and has been deleted.)
According to this data, Japan as a whole consumed 1,091.4 billion kWh of electricity in 2000. The per capita consumption per Japanese person is 8,603 kWh, which almost seven times more than the per capita consumption in Asia as a whole. We are a nation of major power consumers. By way of comparison, the per capita consumption of Americans is 14,684 kWh. What do you think of these actual figures?
Energy conservation can be broadly divided into the industrial, consumer, and transportation sectors, and appropriate measures need to be taken for each. Energy conservation through power saving, which is the objective of Setsuden-mushi, falls into the consumer sector, which is the area where energy conservation efforts are lagging behind the most. Conversely, the industrial sector has been the most successful in energy conservation efforts. Energy conservation and environmental problems cannot be solved without improvements in the consumer sector including households, and the transportation sector including cars and trains.
In the consumer sector, the maximum amount of energy that can be saved by cutting the standby power consumption of fax machines and copy machines is 60 million kWh/year. This is less than 1/10,000th of the total annual power generation in Japan.
However, none of the energy conservation measures can be effective if any one of them is neglected. The concept of "small power saving, big energy saving" by small Setsuden-mushi cannot be ignored.
(Note: A few days before this content was translated into written English on March 25, 2022, Tokyo was alerted to a major power outage because their electricity demand would exceed supply capacity by about 10 percentage.)
Serially posted in English every Friday.
毎週金曜日に連載中
Please refer to the following site for the pictures and/or references.
著者のKarl Kamamotoさんに人生相談を申込む