Landing on the Vienna airport at midnight, I spent more than an hour to find a nearby accommodation because of a system failure of the hotel for which I made a reservation online in Tokyo before departure. Next morning while taking a walk after breakfast, I was a little bit surprised to see a bunch of wind turbines spinning gently in a line on green fields at the backyard of this unknown hotel. I used to think that wind turbines do not match with natural landscape and are ugly. But the scenes were not so bad, or rather they were harmonized into green fields. The hotel was located just 15 km north to the airport.
On the way to Salzburg
Through a window on a train for Salzburg from Vienna, I noticed in the distance a lineup of wind turbines extended to west on green fields and also frequently saw solar panels on rooftops along the railway. Travelling to country sides, from Salzburg to Zell Am See, from Zell to Lienz on trains or buses, and even at the summit stations of lifts in mountains with an altitude of 2000m, I came up with solar panels on roof-tops and wind turbines. I felt that this country, Austria, has a kind of passion toward renewable energy.
Austria vs Japan in energy usage
Japan has turned unwillingly back to fossil fuels since March 2011 when the Great East Japan Earthquake with Tsunami killed not only the nearly 20K people, but also damaged the Fukusima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. This damage has caused all nuclear power plants in Japan (48 plants across 17 regions with the total capacity of around 44 GW as-of 2014 Dec.) to suspend its operation until the recent modest attempts to reopen a few of them, which were confirmed on its safety operation by the Japan Nuclear Regulation Authority.
This means that Japan has currently no way to reduce the carbon-dioxide emission, giving up its commitment to Kyoto protocol of COP3 in 1997 to prevent the global warming from escalating further.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) statistics, Japan produced more than 26% CO2 per capita in 2013 compared with Austria during the same year. Based on the same IEA data, I found these differences came from the use of different energy resources that each country had to generate electricity and heat. Let me illustrate this situation as below;
“Share of total primary energy supply in 2013”
Austria Japan note
Fossil Fuels : 67% 95% coal, oil, natural gas
Nuclear : 0% 1%
Renewables : 33% 5%
(Hydro) (11%) (2%)
(Geo/Solar/Wind): ( 2%) (1%)
(Biofuels/Waste): (20%) (3%)
It's clear that Japan rely heavily on fossil fuels with 95% of the total share, while Austria uses more than 6 times of renewables with notably dependence on hydropower and biofuels/waste. Although Japan has constructed so far many huge hydroelectric power plants spending a lot of money, but they seems to simply store water for the time of emergency in energy supply and not be used effectively for providing constantly power supply. The worst thing is that those construction were often done in sacrifice of natural environment. The most recent ongoing project is the controversial Yatsuba Dam, which was planned to be operated in 2020 with the investment budget of nearly 40 billion USD and eventually will force all village people to evacuate from their ancestral homes. I don't know the exact ratio, but it seems that Austria generates electricity from water in a different way from Japan with Austria using effectively more of smaller facilities such as pumped-storage hydroelectric power stations so that they can preserve the surrounding natural environment and not force people to evacuate from their home land.
At B&B in Zell Am See
In Zell Am See, I based on the Hubertus, a family-run B&B, to go on a hiking in the nearby mountains on the Hohe Tauern National park. In my planning to the hiking trip to Austria while I was in Japan, I picked up this accommodation from the Lonely Planet Guide because of its passion for environmental protection. I had spent memorable four days at a cozy room surrounded with wooden furniture in the house equipped with solar panels.
The pension was awarded the Austrian environmental seal of approval for achieving considerable amount of CO2 saving. The secrets of its success, as it seemed to me, were summarized as in the following basics;
- Save energy
- Purchase of green energy instead of fossil fuel energy
- Harness the eco-friendly power generators
At the summit lookout to the magnificent snow-capped Grossglockner, the highest in Austria, I realized that the glacier has been actually retreating for centuries to reveal its rustic scar due to the global warming, which made me sad.
People here are trying hard to protect its natural fauna by restricting, for example, the car traffic on Alpine high road, while promoting its natural assets for business purposes. I thought that we should care more about our natural environment and make a effort to leave more of its assets to our children.
Smaller efforts with renewables by individuals, but in aggregate those efforts would be proved to be more effective in energy usage and safer in preservation of natural environment than the construction of giant Nuclear reactors or huge Hydroelectric power plants,
Japan will see the liberalization of retail electricity in April, 2016. I hope that this will lead to more effective usage of energy, thus reducing the greenhouse gas emissions in Japan as well as on our planet,
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