Tutorial 1:　"Current Stutas of Japan  Power Market" Mr. Kenichiro Hashimoto (Marubeni Power Retail Corp., Japan)

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Summary: After World War Two, the current nine vertically-integrated electric power companies were created. This structure contributed to the rapid economic growth around 1960’s and 1970’s which needed much electricity in Japan, while these  nine incumbent utilities complied too much extra costs which had been imposed the consumers’ electricity bills, resulting in being Japan as one of the countries having the high electricity rates in the world.　

In 2000, partial retail competition commenced for the large industrial customers, and gradually expanded to the mid-sized commercial and industrial customers until 2005.

In April 2016, all electricity consumers including housholds became eligible to choose their retail supplies, however, most of the power generation facilities have been still owned by nine incumbent utilities, restricting further competition.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, or METI, has been making efforts to promote further competition, however, churn rate has just reached 8% at the end of 2017FY.

This tutorial will discuss the difference about the electricity industry structure between Japan and other counties and what hinders the further competition in Japan, by explaining the policies of deregulation and a behavior of the nine incumbent utilities who have a big influence of the electricity industry. Also, let me discuss a policy about renewable energy in Japan and nuclear generation which should be mentioned with the Fukushima Nuclear Power Stations disaster.

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Kenichiro Hashimoto received BEc from the Keio University in 1993 and joined the Tokyo Electric Power Company. Through career at TEPCO, he was engaged for the research of the electricity market in foreign countries such as United State and EU.

He worked for the Loy Yang Marketing Management Company, an electricity trading company based in Victoria, Australia for three years from 2004 under the secondment agreement between Loy Yang and TEPCO.

He worked as a support member of the Japan Electricity Power Exchange or JEPX, contributing to expansion of the trading volume and creating new products at the JEPX.

After an experience of the renewable energy generation developer, he joined the Marubeni Power Retail Co. in 2017, now serving a role of General Manager, Trading Department of the Marubeni Power Retail Co.

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Tutorial 2: Prof. Hideo Ishii  (Waseda University, Japan),"Recent Trends on Demand Response in Japan"

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Summary:In this tutorial, the development of Demand Response (DR) programs and standard methodologies including a communication protocol in Japan is comprehensively explained. The Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent sever accident in Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station were the trigger for the necessity of controllable demand, and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) initiated the special study committee as well as the national demonstration project on DR in 2012. One of the focus of this activity was “automation” to ensure reliability of DR with smart customers, houses and buildings, possessing Energy Management Systems (EMS). There are two major categories in DR, a price type and an incentive type, and the former has been examined in the “Smart Community Demonstration” while the latter has been progressively studied in a series of demonstration programs in the past 5 years.

Regarding the energy policy, Japanese power system is under the process of “Power System Reform”, which includes deregulation of generation and retail sectors as well as unbundling the power utilities. In 2016, the transmission and distribution system operators (TDSO) had started the procurement of balancing reserves, and in the category I’, DR aggregators as much as 956MW were employed with about 3.6 billion JPY. This event was the first commercialization of incentive type DR. Currently, the power system is moving forward to more market-based mechanism and the procurement process will be absorbed in the forthcoming balancing market. With a provision of more and more distributed energy resources (DER) connected to the grid, such as PV, EV, batteries coming into the demand side, DR has been expanded to “Virtual Power Plant (VPP)”, not only reducing but also increasing electricity consumption at customers, to provide “flexibility” to the grid operation.

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Hideo Ishii joined Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) in 1988. He was a visiting scientist in Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1989 to 1991. He received Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 1996. From 2010, he has been engaged in some major smart grid related National projects in Japan as an organizer. He is now 
a Professor with Advanced Collaborative Research Organization for Smart Society (ACROSS) at Waseda University. His current activity is in Electric Energy System, especially regarding Demand Response (DR) and integration of distributed energy resources (DER) including renewable energy. He has been leading DR standards in Japan.

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Tutorial 3: Dr. Marta  Marmomilli (Mitsubishi Electric Corp., Japan), "System Integration Technologies for Renewables"

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Summary: The increase of distributed resources (DRs), especially renewable energy based, is one of the main driver for smart grid implementation. Several challenges associated with renewables are worldwide recognized: mismatch between supply and demand, instability in frequency and voltage, uneconomical utilization of the resources. The several technical challenges in order to improve the grid performance mitigating the side effect of fluctuating resources are highly required.

Furthermore, DRs make some impact on not only the grid operation, but also the electricity market, therefore, new business framework are also considered for the future penetration.

In this tutorial, virtual power plant (VPP), a combined technical and business approach in order to integrate the distributed resource, is introduced and possibility and benefit of VPP are investigated. A scheme for VPP that include the coordination of distributed generation and demand response in addition to storage resources such as stationary and mobile batteries, will also discussed.

In addition, the standard protocols such as open ADR is essential to make independent resources owners to allow easily ‘plug and play’ in a contract with a VPP from a physical communication level and from a trading level. Concrete examples and pilot tests are introduced and described to confirm the effectiveness of the approach.

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Marta Marmiroli graduate Nuclear Engineering at University of Bologna in 1996, she joined Mitsubishi Electric Corporation in 1997. In 2008, she received her Ph.D in Energy-Environment Engineering from Waseda University. After working for long time on software and systems development for deregulated electricity market, from 2007 she started to investigate on smart grid technologies including smart meters and renewable energy sources management systems. She is now in charge of technologies and business development for energy industry.

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