Years ago, before my first trip to Japan, I decided to look up what kind of adapters I might need for my electronics, and I was surprised to learn that the country isn’t on one standard — and this legacy from the 1800s is leaving Tokyo facing blackouts today:
Japan’s electricity system got its start in 1883 with the founding of Tokyo Electric Light Co. Demand quickly grew and in 1895 the company bought electricity generation equipment from Germany’s AEG. In west Japan the same evolution was taking place, and Osaka Electric Lamp imported equipment from General Electric.
The AEG equipment produced electricity at Europe’s 50Hz (hertz, or cycles per second) standard while the General Electric gear matched the U.S. 60Hz standard. That probably didn’t seem important at the time — after all, light bulbs are happy on either frequency — but the impact of those decisions is being seen today.
All of eastern Japan, including Tokyo and the disaster-struck region to the north, is standardized on 50Hz supply while the rest of the country uses 60Hz.
Connecting the two grids is possible, but it requires frequency changing stations. Three such facilities exist, but they have a total capacity of 1 gigawatt.
When the quake hit, it shut down 11 reactors including three that were in operation at the Fukushima Daiichi plant that is now at the center of Japan’s nuclear problems. With the 11 reactors offline, 9.7GW was gone from eastern Japan’s electricity production capacity.
And that’s the root of Tokyo’s current electricity problems: utility companies in west Japan are unable to make up for all of the lost power.
No one ever recommends drastically increasing the price of scarce electricity during such crises.