But while the future of the sector is promising, a number of long-standing issues continue to hang over the country’s ambitions.

At a seminar hosted by the Ashikaga Institute of Technology in late June, the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation (NEDO) quietly gave the official go-ahead to a 7.4MW project off the southwestern island of Kyushu.

Hitachi Zosen and French offshore wind start-up Ideol first revealed their plans last summer.

The project will consist of two floating turbines — a two-bladed 3MW machine and a standard, three-bladed 4.4MW model — mounted on Ideol’s semi-submersible "damping pool" foundations, with one to be made of concrete and the other from steel.

The consortium, which includes conglomerate Marubeni and the University of Tokyo, expects to commission the turbines off the city of Kitakyushu by some point in 2017-18.

The group has not yet revealed turbine suppliers for the project, which the Japan Wind Power Association (JWPA) claims will reinforce Japan’s position at the forefront of floating wind technology.

The organisation says one of the key takeaways from the plan is NEDO’s desire to aggressively reduce the cost of floating wind technologies — an issue that still weighs on the Fukushima Forward floating wind consortium.

The Fukushima group, backed by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), began towing the third turbine of its ambitious floating wind pilot — a Hitachi 5MW downwind machine — from Osaka Bay to the eastern Japanese port of Onahama this week, ahead of ahead of plans to anchor the machine and its advanced spar floater to the seabed in September.

However, the Marubeni-led consortium is still struggling to achieve the cost reductions that will be key to expanding the three-turbine demonstration site to a 1GW floating wind farm, roughly 20km off the coast of Fukushima prefecture, by 2020.

Beyond the need to sharply reduce the cost of its homegrown floating wind technologies, a number of other issues will weigh on floating and fixed-bottom offshore wind development over the next few years.

To start, the availability of costly installation vessels for floating projects and near-shore installations is still a bottleneck for the construction of future projects.

For example, industry sources tell Recharge — on condition of anonymity — that progress has temporarily slowed on a plan by Japanese telecoms giant SoftBank, developer Komatsuzaki and Tokyo-based financial services group Orix to install 100MW of fixed-bottom capacity off the coast of Ibaraki prefecture.

The companies are struggling to secure affordable jack-up vessels; at this stage, it appears that the project will probably not be completed until some point in 2018.

The Ministry of Environment (MoE), meanwhile, still has yet to streamline the costly environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedure for offshore wind projects, which is a major obstacle to future build-out. Opaque pledges to shorten the EIA process, first made several years ago, remain mired in red tape.

The JWPA, which expects just 300MW of new installations per year through the end of 2017 — the bulk of it onshore — told Recharge this week that the lengthy EIA is the main factor hindering commercial offshore development over the next year and a half.

However, a number of other regulatory and legal developments that have been introduced over the past six months bode well for the future.

METI, for example, now allows developers to secure feed-in tariff (FIT) approval and start negotiating the grid-connection process with regional utilities midway through the EIA process.

Just as importantly, the ministry recently said that it will announce annual FIT rates for three to five years in advance. By providing such clarity on subsidies — rather than waiting until the end of each fiscal year to reveal the new rates for the subsequent 12-month period — developers will be able to plan ahead more effectively, while lenders will start to feel more confident about financing new projects.

Furthermore, METI will likely maintain its current FIT rates — now set at ¥22/kWh for onshore wind farms and ¥36/kWh for offshore projects — for the next fiscal year starting in April 2017.

In addition, a number of recent legislative changes by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MILT) will open up new opportunities in the years ahead to install turbines in the nation’s ports, which the JWPA believes are ideal locations for near-shore projects.

The municipal authorities in Kitakyushu, the site of the recently approved NEDO floating project, have already revealed plans to expand the city’s port facilities and begin bidding for new near-shore projects later this summer.

The JWPA says that such efforts to build commercial projects in ports are crucial to capitalising on the potential momentum created by MILT’s legislative amendments, which took effect this week.

And there are a number of other reasons for industry advocates to remain optimistic about the development outlook beyond the turn of the current decade.

Marubeni, for example, expects to complete 145MW of offshore wind capacity in northern Japan’s Akita prefecture by 2021, while a consortium under Hitachi Zosen expects to finish building a massive 220MW project in the Sea of Japan, off the coast of Niigata prefecture, by 2024.

In addition, the MoE still has yet to reveal the results of a study it spearheaded last year — partly in conjunction with the authorities in Kitakyushu — to assess the potential to install up to 1.45GW of offshore wind capacity at four sites throughout Japan.

And at the beginning of this year, the UK Carbon Trust announced plans to help establish a floating wind and tidal energy test facility in western Japan’s Nagasaki prefecture.

Sure, annual installation growth has been underwhelming thus far, with just 244MW of new wind capacity, primarily onshore, connected to the grid in 2015.

And the government’s long-term energy targets are disappointing. With all renewables — including solar, geothermal and biomass— set to account for just 22-24% of the national energy mix by 2030, the amount of wind that will be built over the next 14 years will likely fall below the hopes of the industry’s most fervent proponents.

Change rarely occurs quickly in Japan and the pace of development continues to lag behind initial industry expectations. But momentum is clearly building in favour of offshore wind development.

And given the wide range of different technologies that are being tested in both the Fukushima and NEDO-backed floating offshore demonstration projects, the industry’s future trajectory is positive, in sum.

Wind

Japan's floating wind ambitions inch forward with approval of Ideol, Hitachi Zosen project