The Diet last month enacted two bills to finalize the liberalization of the electricity and city gas industries. The government should do its utmost to ensure not only fair treatment of all entrants into the markets but also the stable supply of electricity and city gas to consumers.

Under a revision of the Electricity Business Law, the culmination of the liberalization of the power industry will come in April 2020, when power transmission and distribution sections will be separated from the nation's nine major power firms, which now enjoy regional monopolies. An earlier stage of reform started in April when the Organization for Cross-regional Coordination of Transmission Operations was established to facilitate power transmission between western and eastern Japan in case of an emergency. OCCTO's establishment was prompted by the experience of what happened in the wake of the March 2011 crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. Moving power to disaster-hit eastern Japan was made difficult by the difference in the frequency of electricity between the two regions.

In April 2016, retail sale of electricity to households and other small-lot users will be opened to new entrants. Since the gradual liberalization of electricity sales began in 1995, businesses from various other sectors have been selling electricity to large-scale users such as plant operators and have already taken a market share worth 3 million kilowatts of electricity — equivalent to the output capacity of three nuclear power plants combined.