American developer United Wind has formed a partnership with Tokyo Electric Power Company to jointly develop small wind projects in Japan from next year.
United Wind said the large Japanese utility, also known as TEPCO, had contributed to an equity funding round that includes investments from oil companies Statoil and Total. It didn’t specify the size of the contribution.
“Japan’s distributed wind market has the potential to be significant in scale, thanks to an aggressive small wind feed-in-tariff, which works well with our leasing model,” United Wind chief executive Russell Tencer said.
Distributed wind developments are commonly small-scale projects that are installed at residential, agricultural or industrial sites.
Japan’s feed-in-tariff was established in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in order to diversify the country’s energy mix. There were 312 small wind projects, with a combined capacity of around 4.6MW, approved for the subsidy at the end of 2015, United Wind said.
Image: SXC
