Oct 18 - Jiji Press English News Service

Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will reintroduce in this fiscal year a subsidy program for home-use solar power systems as part of its anti-global warming effort.

Under the program, the government will pay 70,000 yen for every kilowatt of power generation capacity, offering 200,000 to 250,000 yen to each household adopting a regular solar power system with a capacity of 3 to 3.5 kilowatts. The subsidies therefore will cover about 10 pct of purchase costs, which reach around 2 million yen.

Japan provided subsidies to households adopting solar power systems between 1994 and fiscal 2005, when the subsidy program was scrapped for financial reasons.

But the government decided to revive subsidies as it adopted a goal in July of boosting the amount of electricity generated by solar power systems tenfold by 2020 to realize a low-carbon society.

According to the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, 12 prefectural governments and 284 municipal governments already have their own subsidy plans for solar power systems.

As the national program can be used with those plans, some households may be able to cover nearly one-third of their purchase costs with subsidies.

Expecting a total of 135,000 households to receive the subsidies, the central government set aside 9 billion yen for the assistance program in a fiscal 2008 supplementary budget, which was enacted on Thursday.

METI included 23.8 billion yen for the program in its budget request for fiscal 2009.END

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