Energy

It is 5 p.m. on a weekday in Huizhou, a lake-studded city in China's Guangdong Province, and workers are streaming out of a BYD manufacturing plant looking weary after a day's work. Many head straight for the crowded street food stalls lined up in front of the factory for after-work noodles and drinks.

For Yumi Someya, Tokyo is an untapped oil field, full of potential to generate electricity.The precious fuel, however, doesn’t exist underground. It’s a resource sitting in the kitchens of millions of Japanese homes — cooking oil.

Japan Atomic Power obtained a long-awaited approval on Wednesday to extend the life of its reactor northeast of Tokyo through November 2038, but the company still faces an uphill battle in winning community support before it can bring the station back online.

One of the largest solar power plants in the country has been built in Okayama Prefecture in a project joined by a unit of General Electric Co., with a ceremony held Friday to mark its completion.

Toshiba Corp. on Thursday announced its five-year business reform plan to revamp its operations, with thousands of global job cuts, a withdrawal from its nuclear plant construction business in Britain and a sell-off of a U.S. liquefied natural gas operation on the agenda.

Japan's biotechnology company euglena is to start mass production of bio jet fuel and biodiesel out of algae and waste oil, with the aim of being the first company to fuel green commercial flights out of Japan.

The domestic nuclear industry will miss a government target of providing at least a fifth of the country’s electricity by 2030, analysis shows, but the sector is showing signs of life more than seven years since the Fukushima crisis.With eight reactors running and one more set to come online in November, nuclear has this year overtaken nonhydro renewables in power output for the first time since the 2011 catastrophe, when all of the country’s nuclear plants were idled.

Shikoku Electric Power Co. on Saturday restarted a reactor at its Ikata nuclear power plant after a suspension of nearly one year due to a high court order.

Tohoku Electric Power Co. said Thursday it will scrap the idled No. 1 unit at its Onagawa nuclear power plant in Miyagi Prefecture, more than 30 years after it started operations.

Shikoku Electric Power Co. on Saturday restarted a reactor at the Ikata nuclear power plant in western Japan after a suspension of nearly one year due to a high court order.