Tokyo, Japan requires new residential buildings to be equipped with solar panels
According to the Asahi Shimbun, a plenary meeting of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly of Japan was held on the 15th, and the revised regulations on "requiring that new residential buildings in the Tokyo Metropolitan must be installed with solar panels from April 2025" were passed. This is the first regulation in Japan for new individual housing. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government also plans to effectively use a large number of building roofs to vigorously develop solar power projects to reduce household carbon emissions.
According to the new system, (1) large residential buildings, such as buildings and apartments, (2) owners of a family building less than 2.000 square meters are obliged to install solar panels on the roof. Builders need to report the number of new buildings to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government every year and calculate the target power generation based on the number of new buildings. The builder will choose how to install solar panels within the target power generation range.
According to the statistics of Tokyo Metropolitan, about 50,000 new residential buildings are built every year. Tokyo expects that 2800 of them will meet the conditions for installing solar panels. Among them, 96% and about 20000 buildings in Item (2) meet the installation conditions. It is calculated that after the implementation of the new system, the solar power generation capacity that can be increased is 40000 kilowatts per year. The solar power generation capacity of Tokyo in 2020 is 646000 kilowatts, which can increase the power generation capacity by about 6%.
The installation cost of solar panels is about 1 million yen. According to the calculation of Tokyo Metropolitan, the cost can be recovered in 10 years by consuming and selling excess electricity in their own homes. However, some users are still deeply worried about the burden of the installation cost of solar panels. In this regard, Tokyo will launch a leasing subsidy policy to reduce the economic burden of housing buyers.
