Raising household tariffs with every reactor idle, and applying to restart Sendai 1 and 2 first (2013)

¥1.24, and two years and three months

The decision of 2013 was taken where three timescales failed to mesh. Fuel costs went out by the month; a tariff revision took close to half a year from application to approval; the safety review of a reactor took years. What Kyushu Electric chose was a combination — hold the immediate position with the fastest-acting instrument, and entrust the recovery of the accounts to the slowest one. That the increase was cut from the 8.51% applied for to 6.23% shows how far that immediate support was a thing decided by assessment rather than by management.

How the decision looks changes with where the figures are placed. From the company’s side it was a loss of ¥332.5 billion and a rationalization programme on the order of ¥140 billion. From the customer’s side it was ¥1.24 per kilowatt-hour, about ¥220 a month for a standard household. On the side of the host communities stand more than ¥25 billion in siting grants, more than ¥50 billion in property taxes, and petition signatures reaching a majority of the population. Two years and three months after the increase took effect, on 11 August 2015, the reactor of Sendai No. 1 was started up.