A government-appointed panel of experts has recommended deregulation of electrical power production and distribution to outside competition. The recommendation resulted from Japan's recent major review of the industry that is expected to assist with dealing with chronic power shortages since the March 2011 nuclear disaster. The panel called for the following changes:
• Equal access to transmission networks to promote new entries in the power production business
• More flexible pricing structures to allow utilities to charge higher rates whenever there is increased demand
• Freeing up the market for power supply to the household sector
• Encouraging existing regional monopolies to compete in each other's markets
The Japanese government will craft a bill to liberalize the market currently dominated by a few regional monopolies.
This article was reprinted with permission from ZE Data Watch (www.ze.com /). The full publication is available at this location: http://www.ze.com/datawatch/DataWatch_January.pdf .