Electricity demand increases more than 70% from 1990 to 2006 in Japan. To meet with Kyoto Protocol targets, Ministry of Environment and some local municipalities have been discussing the introduction of carbon tax. To predict future energy needs and design pricing and taxation policies considering efficiency and equity, it is quite important for policy makers to understand price elasticity by regions. However, there has been little discussion on the regional and residential electricity price elasticities in Japan. In this paper, I estimate regional price elasticities of household’s electricity demand by a partial-adjustment approach based on panel household expenditure survey data. Fixed effect model with varying coefficients was selected. The short-run price elasticities range between about -0.5- -0.9 and long-run estimates range between about -1.0 - -2.7. Three metropolitan regions with higher income and share of city gas in total energy consumption show higher price elasticities than non metropolitan regions. In addition, residential customers are more price sensitive than industrial/commercial customers.

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An economic and process energy evaluation for the feasibility study on non-sulfuric acid pretreatment processes of the bio-ethanol production from rice straw was conducted. The total process was designed, which consists of pre-cutting, non-sulfuric acid treatment such as hydrothermal or mechanical fine grinding, enzymatic saccharifiction, fermentation, and distillation processes. The technical issues were clarified through the sensitive analysis. The production cost and process energy of the improvement scenario were estimated 97 ¥/L, 8.9 MJ/L, respectively.

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