Tokyo Hopes Rooftop Solar Mandate Will Help It Get Through Hot Summers
Like California, the Japanese capital wants the sun to power new homes, but some call policy ineffective and too reliant on China
4 min
TOKYO—Heat waves this summer are pushing Tokyo’s power grid near the limit. The city of 14 million has mandated installing solar panels on new single-family homes to get some breathing room—even if it has to buy most of the panels from China.
The policy in one of the world’s largest metropolises is a test case for whether solar power makes sense on urban rooftops. The idea has long drawn attention as a way to fight global warming but has advanced relatively slowly worldwide, apart from a rooftop solar mandate in California pushed by Democratic Govs. Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom.
“We need to prepare to protect not only our national security, but also the energy security of individual households,” Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike, the architect of the mandate, said in an interview.
Koike has had panels on her own house for a decade. As a government minister, she created a “Cool Biz” plan that led Japanese salarymen to ditch suits and ties in summertime so they could keep the thermostat higher.
In the Land of the Rising Sun, Koike said, “we unfortunately aren’t rich in oil and gas, but wouldn’t it be fitting if we could instead harness the sun?”
Proponents say more rooftop solar would help on hot summer days when electricity demand peaks, and make the city resilient if an earthquake or typhoon knocked out the power grid.
The downsides: More solar also means higher electricity bills, including for lower-income apartment dwellers, because homeowners with rooftop panels can sell their excess power to the grid at an above-market rate. Even with the mandate, solar power generated in Tokyo is projected to supply only 4% of the city’s electricity in 2030.
“We cannot have a sufficient amount of power generation just by having solar panels on limited rooftops,” said Tatsuya Terazawa, head of the government-affiliated Institute of Energy Economics, Japan.
Still, Koike said it is important to move toward carbon-neutral electricity and help Japan buy less Russian natural gas.
The city predicts that by 2050, half of Tokyo’s current structures will be replaced. “By targeting newly built houses, we can decide the future 50 years from now,” Koike said.
Tokyo’s mandate, released last December, will initially apply only to about 50 of the largest home builders in the city, which it says account for around three-fifths of new homes. Starting in April 2025, those builders will be given a quota that will in effect require them to put panels on most new homes, while allowing them leeway to forgo solar in cases where the roof is too small or lacks sunlight exposure.
“We want companies to make sure that wherever you can put them, you put as many as you can,” said city environmental official Toshifumi Fukuyasu.
Japan relies on imported natural gas and coal for most of its electricity, and Russia supplies about one-tenth of its natural gas. The power company serving the capital, Tokyo Electric Power, or Tepco, isn’t operating any nuclear plants currently after the meltdowns at its Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011.
In March 2022, the city came dangerously close to running short of electricity on a cold day, and it faced another crunch months later during a heat wave.
Tepco has managed to keep the lights on this summer, despite weeks of sweltering weather in which the thermometer consistently topped 95 degrees. Still, it says it worries about electricity running short, and the city encourages people to keep their homes at 82 degrees.
Tokyo University professor Yumiko Iwafune, who studies energy demand, said that even if rooftop solar panels don’t generate much electricity overall, they still can help households become self-sufficient on summer days, lessening demand on Tepco.
Tokyo has drawn comparisons between its policy and California’s rooftop solar mandate, which took effect in 2020 and similarly applies to new low-rise residential buildings. The California Energy Commission estimates that 150,000 new homes covered by the law have been constructed with solar panels.
Newsom, the governor, said in May 2022 that rooftop solar is “an industry that is essential to our state’s future.” California expanded its mandate last year to encompass certain new commercial buildings.
But the state’s mandate is contentious even among advocates of renewable energy, some of whom say it would be cheaper to build large solar and wind installations.
James Bushnell, an economics professor at the University of California, Davis, said rooftop solar mandates tend to raise electricity bills for people who don’t have solar because grid operators often pay higher prices for home-generated electricity. “A large ‘benefit’ of solar is in fact a shift of costs onto other, often lower-income non-home owning customers,” Bushnell wrote in an email.
Another problem in Japan is its lack of domestically produced solar panels, although it was once a leader in the technology.
According to the International Energy Agency, China produces around 85% of the globe’s solar cells and 95% of key components needed to make them.
“We’ve realised we can’t win against China,” said a spokesman for the Japan Photovoltaic Energy Association, an industry group representing companies in the solar-energy business.
Unlike the U.S., Japan still permits the import of solar panels with materials sourced from China’s Xinjiang region, where the U.S. has alleged the Beijing government has carried out genocide against the Uyghur ethnic group. Beijing denies that.
“Most people aren’t very aware about the human-rights violations associated with solar panels. They think of it as a good thing because of the environment,” said Taishi Sugiyama, a research director at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, a Tokyo-based think tank. He said Tokyo should scrap its solar mandate.
Fukuyasu, the Tokyo city official, said he agreed Japan needed more suppliers of solar panels. “But in Tokyo, we need solar to create a zero-emission society, and we can’t postpone that,” he said.
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
The 1860s Darlinghurst mansion Stoneleigh could become Sydney’s most expensive home ever sold under the hammer when it goes to auction. Clint Ballard is giving buyers a $28 million guide for the heritage-listed mansion on Darley Street, opposite Iona, the former home of Hollywood royalty Baz Luhrmann. Stoneleigh is being offered for sale for the …
Set on one of the city’s last absolute riverfront sites, The Riversdale by Mosaic combines irreplaceable waterfront ownership with one of Brisbane’s most significant residential opportunities.
A growing number of employers say Gen Z job seekers are bringing their parents into the hiring process, from attending interviews and negotiating offers to questioning performance reviews. Recruiters warn the trend may raise concerns about independence, even as some families see it as support in a challenging job market.
4 min
Steven Clark had the unpleasant task of firing a 24-year-old—twice. Once was in a brief conversation with the new hire, who’d showed up late or not at all four times in his first week at a construction job.
Then Clark had to do it all over again, this time with the guy’s mother.
She called him a few hours later, pleading to give her son another chance. When Clark told her no, things got heated before he ended the call.
“I said, ‘Look, you know, this is between us and your son. He’s the employee,’” says Clark, who is chief operating officer of a Fairbanks, Alaska-based staffing firm.
Gen Zers make up nearly one-fifth of the adult workforce, and bosses and recruiters say it often feels like the nervous parents who hovered over them through childhood and college are right alongside them. What began as the occasional parent ride-along to a job interview coming out of the Covid era is now full-on career “co-piloting,” said Jasmine Escalera, head career coach at résumé templates service Zety.
More parents are calling up hiring managers, applying for jobs on their adult child’s behalf, and even showing up—or lurking just off-screen—on Zoom calls to help navigate difficult conversations or go over benefits packages.
“The first time it happened, I was appalled,” says Clark, who has fielded calls from parents asking why their child didn’t get a job. “Since then it’s become more of a here-we-go-again reaction.”
Human resource professionals have expressed outrage on social media.
“Parents should not be calling employers to check on their application status or ask questions on behalf of their child,” says Lynne Alba, a director of talent acquisition and physician recruitment at a large health system on Long Island, who vented about the phenomenon in a Tik Tok video she reposted on LinkedIn.
At a recent job fair, a mother approached Alba with her daughter’s résumé, explaining that she wanted to work as a nurse. “While I appreciated that she was trying to help, I intentionally shifted my attention to her daughter. No matter what Mom said, I wanted to hear directly from the candidate,” says Alba.
Some parents who step in say it’s a challenging job market for young people, and that they would only intervene in extreme circumstances—social anxiety, a toxic boss, unfair treatment. There’s also a gray area of intervention that some see as an extension of the parental advice and networking help that’s been happening for generations.
Rick Wainschel last year published a post on LinkedIn asking his network to help his daughter, a recent college graduate, find a corporate entry-level position.
Wainschel, a vice president at an automotive marketing technology company, says he doesn’t think his outreach qualifies as helicoptering. “Well, maybe a little,” he said, before quickly adding he was being half tongue-in-cheek. “It was really merely just to help her get a network established. I just think the work world is a challenging place.”
Wainschel’s post, which was OK’d by his daughter on the condition he didn’t embarrass her, didn’t lead to a job but did result in productive conversations, he said. She found a job with a credit union on her own shortly after.
Recruiters and other HR types say aggressive parental involvement signals a lack of independence and raises fears that mom and dad will be checking in regularly if their kid gets hired.
What’s more, they say, such interference rarely, if ever, works.
The phenomenon is becoming so commonplace it made the agenda of human resources organization SHRM’s national conference in June. When James Harrell asked a room of 250 professionals if they ever had a parent calling on behalf of a young employee or coming to an interview, more than half raised their hands.
“The first time it happened to me, I got high up on my soapbox and I shook my fist,” Harrell says. “The 15th time I said, ‘OK, well, I gotta figure out how to do something differently.’”
Harrell helped run an apprenticeship program for high-school students while he was the human capital management chief for the San Antonio Independent School District. To run interference, the district introduced a “signing day” when parents could come and ask questions.
After a Gen Z employee at Nation’s Best Holdings, a chain of hardware and home goods stores, didn’t get an “exceeds expectations” designation on his performance review last year, HR chief Amber Little got a call asking why.
It was one of a number of calls from parents her office has picked up recently about issues ranging from negative feedback to understanding which health insurance plan to choose. Little has even noticed parents are now calling in sick for their adult kids.
“Instead of coaching them, they do it for them,” Little says. When it happens, she adds, “we encourage them to tell their child to come talk to us and we will walk them through it.”
A Zety survey of more than 1,000 Gen Zers found 20% had a parent attend a job interview with them.
“You get a sense it’s all hands on deck for some families,” says Keith Wolf, managing partner of recruiting firm Murray Resources in Houston. His office has received emails from parents seeking jobs for their children, and Wolf says he’s always wondered if the kids even knew.
Paul “PB” Branson, who graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia in May, bristles at the thought. The 22-year-old says while he understands their anxiety, parents shouldn’t be joining their children’s job interviews or contacting employees on their behalf.
“That trend,” he says, “has really hurt my generation by creating this kind of stereotype that we need our hands held.”
A cluster of century-old warehouses beneath the Harbour Bridge has been transformed into a modern workplace hub, now home to more than 100 businesses.
Barnet, in North London, lays claim to two of the country’s most expensive roads to own a home.
