As nuclear power plants are being restarted in Japan, the government should stop to consider what the rest of the world is doing. Last year, global wind power capacity surpassed nuclear for the first time. Japan, however, is already far behind this global trend, with only a small fraction of its energy coming from wind.
Data released by the Global Wind Energy Council, a body that tracks worldwide energy usage, shows that a record 63.01 gigawatts of energy was added to worldwide wind power capacity in 2015 to reach a total of 432.42 GW. That compares with 382.55 GW for global nuclear power capacity, according to the London-based World Nuclear Association.
That small victory for clean energy was not helped much by Japan, where only 3.04 GW of wind power was produced in 2015. The government drafted a plan to boost wind power to 1.7 percent of the nation's energy mix by 2030, but this figure is startlingly low compared with the current percentage — 3 percent — of global electricity supplied by wind power. The Environment Ministry estimates that Japan has the potential to build enough wind power facilities to produce 280 GW, but that potential has not even begun to be tapped.