At Least One Week Needed for Fully Restoring Electricity in Hokkaido

September 7, 2018

Tokyo- It will likely take a week or longer for electricity supply to be restored in the whole of Hokkaido after a powerful earthquake struck the northernmost Japan prefecture early Thursday, industry minister Hiroshige Seko said the same day.

The 6.7-magnitude quake, which occurred shortly after 3 a.m. (6 p.m. Wednesday GMT), caused all three units at Hokkaido Electric Power Co.'s  Tomatoatsuma thermal power plant to stop operations because of damage to such equipment as pipes and turbines.

As a result, Hokkaido Electric was forced to temporarily halt its entire thermal power generation due to disruption to the electricity supply-demand balance in its service area. The disruption in the balance led other power plants of the company to stop automatically in a very unusual development, resulting in blackouts at 2.95 million households throughout Hokkaido.

"The power outage is the biggest in Hokkaido since the Heisei era started" in 1989, a senior official of the industry ministry said.

It was the first time that electricity supply has been cut in the almost entire service area of a power company in Japan, according to the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan. Such a phenomenon did not occur even after the 9.0-magnitude earthquake hit the Tohoku northeastern Japan region in March 2011, officials of the federation said.

The Tomatoatsuma thermal power plant in the town of Atsuma, which is located near the seismic center of the temblor, is the largest thermal power plant of Hokkaido Electric, with the three units having a combined output of 1.65 million kilowatts.

"It will take at least one week" to resume operations at the plant, Seko told reporters in Tokyo.

Of the suspended power stations, the Sunagawa plant in the city of Sunagawa partially resumed operations on Thursday afternoon. As a result, the power outage was resolved at about 330,000 households.

The Japanese government will help Hokkaido Electric secure within Friday a capacity for 3 million kilowatts of electricity, enough for consumption by 2.5 million households, through the restart of other thermal power stations and electricity supply from power companies in the Honshu main island of Japan.

At a meeting of relevant cabinet ministers in Tokyo on Thursday, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said, "We aim to restart electricity supply to over one million households in Hokkaido by Friday morning."

But the blackout may continue for an extended period in some areas as the peak electricity demand in the whole of Hokkaido is estimated at around 3.8 million kilowatts.

The industry ministry instructed Hokkaido Electric to send power supply vehicles to important facilities, such as hospitals, while asking the industry federation to assist the power supplier.

In response to the ministry's request, Tohoku Electric Power Co., Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc., Chubu Electric Power Co. and Hokuriku Electric Power Co. decided to send power supply vehicles to Hokkaido.

At a press conference on Thursday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga requested residents in Hokkaido areas where power supply has been resumed to save electricity as much as they can.

Asked about possible scheduled blackout or power-saving requests to large business operators in Hokkaido, Suga said that the government will consider every possible measure. Jiji Press