Spend a few minutes to fill in a single-page form from a government website, and mail it in — that is all you need to register as a power producer in Japan as it opens its ¥8.1 trillion ($67 billion) retail electricity market.
More than 750 applicants, from rice farmers to billionaire Masayoshi Son's mobile carrier SoftBank Group Corp., have signed up to provide electricity and compete with the existing 10 regional monopolies. Fewer than 100 of them are already supplying power to the industrial market, which has already been deregulated. They have almost doubled their share over the last three years and now account for about 5 percent of Japan's supply.
While Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pushes for the return of nuclear power after the 2011 Fukushima disaster led to the shutdown of the country's reactors, he is also promoting liberalization as a way to reduce costs and increase grid reliability for residential consumers.