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.
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For Central Element, the start of work at Pearl represents another step in the company’s growing eastern suburbs pipeline.
All three vehicles will form part of a broader charitable initiative benefiting Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the American Red Cross and Starlight Children’s Foundation
Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
A luxury lifestyle might cost more than it used to, but how does it compare with cities around the world?
A haven for hedge-fund titans and Hollywood grandees, Greenwich is one of the world’s most expensive residential enclaves, where eye-watering prices meet unapologetic grandeur.
