BY JAPAN NRG TEAM
Japan’s electricity reform has produced many new markets, committees and acronyms. But its most important project is not a market at all. It is a control system being built by Hitachi.
The difficulty is that the system has proved much more complex to design than initially expected, and the project is now running behind schedule. This next-generation nationwide load dispatching system was originally supposed to start operating in the latter half of the 2020s. The target is now fiscal 2032, and the transmission operators warn that testing problems or major regulatory changes could push the start date back again.
As METI’s discussions acknowledge, market design can only go so far. The new arrangements cannot work as intended until the software exists to translate market decisions into instructions that power stations and local grid operators can actually use.
Hitachi won the initial order in November 2023 from Transmission and Distribution IT & OT Systems, an entity established by the ten general transmission and distribution operators. The project is supposed to integrate the dispatch systems of nine areas, excluding Okinawa. Until now, each regional utility developed and operated its own dispatch system. But as the power trading sector expands with more renewable energy and interregional trading, this structure is no longer sufficient.
The new system is meant to replace the regional patchwork with a shared national platform. Of course, it will not remove every regional control room. Local systems will still monitor their networks and communicate with generators, but a common main system will now gather information from all nine areas and calculate how the generation fleet should be operated.
In a way, Japan is moving from nine regional brains exchanging limited information to one national brain connected to nine pairs of eyes and hands.