ONE reason for Japan’s reliance on nuclear power—with all its attendant difficulties of building reactors safely in an earthquake zone—is its lack of indigenous energy sources. Yet it does have one that seems under-exploited, namely the wind. According to a report published in 2009 by the Global Wind Energy Council, Japan, which generates 8.7% of the world’s economic output, has just 1.3% of its capacity to make electricity from the air. The world’s third-largest economy, then, is 13th in the world’s windpower league table.
According to Chuichi Arakawa, a mechanical engineer at the University of Tokyo, that is because Japan has too much of the wrong sort of wind. First, the typhoons which regularly strike the place are simply too powerful. (In 2003, for example, such a storm crippled six turbines on Miyakojima, near Okinawa.) Second, the regular winds that blow through the country are less useful than they might be because Japan is so mountainous.
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