On December 1, 2024, Nippon Clean Farm, a Nipponham (NH Foods) Group company, commissioned a 2.6MW solar power plant in Nanporo Town, Hokkaido, and started self-wheeling the generated power to its pig farms in the prefecture.
The solar power plant, sitting on an approximately 3.3ha plot of land, was constructed and will be operated with the support of Banpu Japan.
While the self-wheeling scheme, unlike a regular off-site PPA scheme, comes with power plant ownership restrictions among other limitations, it has the benefit of being exempt from paying the renewable power promotion surcharge. The surcharge varies year by year and is currently 3.49 yen per kWh.
Since its entry into the Japanese market in 2014, the Japanese subsidiary of Thailand’s Banpu has developed multiple solar projects under the feed-in-tariff (FIT) scheme ranging from 1MWAC all the way to 20MWAC. More recently, the company has also been involved in corporate PPAs and battery storage. It is currently building its first grid-scale BESS, a 14.5MW facility in Iwate Prefecture.
