By Tsuyoshi Inajima and Emi Urabe
Making the world’s biggest city beautiful is a task Japan’s
beleaguered Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings Inc. is unlikely to
relish.
The company known as Tepco, which faces $144 billion in clean up
costs for the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown, has been assigned with
removing hundreds of thousands of utility poles across Tokyo so visitors
to the 2020 Olympics can enjoy uninterrupted views of its famous cherry
blossoms and neon-lit streets.
While this adds to the burdens of the embattled company, which is
paying compensation to victims after a triple meltdown left it on the
verge of default and in need of a government bailout, Yuriko Koike may
not have sympathy. The Tokyo governor, co-author of the book ‘No Power
Pole Revolution,’ wants to accelerate plans to remove the poles from the
metropolis―a project that could cost as much as $6.8 billion.
Power and utility cables hang from poles on a street in
Hachioji in Tokyo, Japan. Japan’s regional power utilities have endured
several years of mounting losses after turning off nuclear power since
the Fukushima disaster of March 2011. Bloomberg
“The government and the public say Japan has too many power poles and
cables compared to other countries and wonder ‘what’s wrong with
Japan?’” said Makoto Imabeppu, a manager at Tepco’s power grid unit. “We
think the current circumstances won’t allow us to say we don’t want to
do it because of costs.”
There are almost as many utility poles scattered across Japan as
there are cherry trees―about 35 million―and a walk down any alley or
side street will take you under a network of overhead cables held higher
with concrete, steel or wooden piles. This has raised criticism the
city’s development is too far behind the likes of Paris, London and Hong
Kong, where 100 percent of power lines are buried underground versus
just 7 percent in central Tokyo.
But it’s not just looks. Koike argues that the poles could exacerbate
a catastrophe should a large earthquake hit Tokyo. There’s a 70 percent
chance a magnitude 7 quake will hit the capital area over the next 30
years, according to the government. Koike, who experienced the magnitude
6.9 Kobe tremor in 1995 that killed over 6,000 people, warns that power
poles tend to collapse during big quakes and block emergency vehicles
from passing, causing fires to sweep through the city. Zero pole goal
“I want to reduce the number of poles in Tokyo to zero,” Koike said
in a speech to parliament in December. “As well as collapsing and
holding up relief efforts in the event of a disaster, they’re damaging
the scenery.”
The Tokyo government plans to start or complete works to bury 916
kilometers of currently-overhead cables over five years through the end
of the fiscal year ending March 2019 before eventually laying 1,442
kilometers of wires underground across the the city. Placing one
kilometer of underground cables costs about 530 million yen ($4.76
million), according to an estimate by Japan’s land ministry, meaning
costs could stretch to as much as 764 billion yen.
Tepco added 0.5 percent to 438 yen on Monday after falling 7.6
percent this year through Friday. The benchmark Topix index increased
0.3 percent to pare this year’s losses to 0.1 percent.
Though the central government and municipalities will shoulder
two-thirds of the bill, the rest will fall on utilities such as Tepco
and Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., according to Seigo Arie, a
manager at the Tokyo metropolitan government’s construction bureau.
About 5.9 million poles are in Tokyo and surrounding areas supplied by
Tepco, according to Imabeppu. A major issue
Tepco has agreed to help lay about 100 kilometers a year of
underground cables by 2019, costing the company 16.5 billion yen a year,
Imabeppu said. The long-term goal to totally rid the city’s poles has
no deadline, according to the Tokyo government.
“Building underground cables costs 10 times more than above-ground
lines,” said Tepco’s Imabeppu. “That’s one of the major issues for us.”
The other issue is logistics. There’s a long way to go for Koike to
achieve her target, with as many as 15,000 new utility poles erected in
areas supplied by Tepco every year, Imabeppu says. Often the utility
also has to negotiate with landowners to put a transformer and other
above-ground facilities on their property.
For managers at Tepco, finding the time to bury cables while
contending with the nuclear meltdown is another thorn in their side. But
it’s also one they say they’re unable to refuse.
“We are not against the Tokyo government’s plans,” said Kenichiro
Matsui, a spokesman for Tepco Power Grid Inc. “But we have to find the
best way to do it as we don’t have inexhaustible funds.”
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