Staff writer

What is important to do as an entrepreneur is to sense and catch the trend of the times, said Sachio Semmoto, a Keio University professor and one of the nation's top entrepreneurs.

"Multimedia business, which was burgeoning in the 1980s, has grown into a huge 500 trillion yen market," he said. "Now in the late 1990s, environment-related businesses are emerging as a new trend and may well evolve into a gigantic industry."

With this in mind, Semmoto decided to start the nation's first full-fledged ecological wind power company. He said the situation surrounding "eco-business" today is reminiscent of that for multimedia in 1984, when he helped set up DDI Corp., now a major long-distance telecommunications company.

Semmoto, who left DDI and now serves as chairman of Eco Power Co., believes success is in store for his 6-month-old company. But, he said, he is not expecting that wind power generation, which now accounts for only a negligible portion of the nation's total electricity supply, will ever become a major energy source in Japan. "I would give it a high mark if it ever got to the point of accounting for some 10 percent of the total," he said. "But even with that, we are talking about a 1.5 trillion yen market."

Government officials contend that many obstacles, ranging from the lack of suitable locations to difficulties in making worthwhile investment, exist in promoting wind power generation. As of 1996, the actual unit cost of wind power generation was about 40 yen per kwh, roughly four times what it costs in thermal power generation, according to the Federation of Electric Power Companies.

According to the government's long-term energy supply plan, as it stands today, wind power generation will be producing some 150,000 kw of electricity in 2010, accounting for only 0.01 percent of total energy consumption. But Semmoto thinks the government's pessimistic view is nonsense.

For one thing, he said, the cost of wind power at Eco Power is only 20 percent to 30 percent higher than the cost of thermal power generation. "We can further bring down the cost, possibly to a 10 yen per kwh level, if we can construct a large scale wind farm with 300 to 400 windmills at one site," he said.

To begin with, Eco Power plans to construct experimental wind farms with fewer then 100 windmills in several locations next year. Although the company has yet to conclude wholesale contracts with potential buyers, Semmoto said, negotiations are under way with Tokyo Electric Power Co., the nation's top power company. "Roughly speaking, we intend to reach 2 billion yen in sales in the first business year running through the end of July, and 8 billion yen in the second year," he said. "Then, in the third year, we are hoping to bring our turnover nearly to 20 billion yen."

Rebutting the government's argument that suitable locations are lacking, Semmoto foresees no difficulty in finding grounds for constructing wind farms. "They say it's impossible because Japan does not have wind force strong enough to generate power. But that's not true," he said, adding that his company is already studying a number of potential sites. "How many wind farms are we going to construct? That's a question of how much investment we can afford, not a question of land availability," he said. "After all, we are surrounded by the sea in the middle of a monsoon zone."

In setting energy policy, he said, up until recently, Japan has paid little attention to the environment and has been depending too heavily on fossil fuels. But that attitude will have to change now that Japan is coming under growing pressure to shift to environmentally sound energies, he said, adding that wind power generation is about the only practical option, at least for the time being.

At the recent U.N. conference on global warming in Kyoto, Japan promised to cut its carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by 6 percent from 1990 levels in the next 15 years.