By the end of January 2014, capacity of Japan’s solar energy-based power generation facilities has exceeded 16GW, announced METI. The data also explained that capacity of certified non-residential PV facilities increased by 2.65GW and the capacity of facilities in operation increased by 483MW during late December 2013 and late January 2014.

More than 300 thousands of PV power generations facilities have been certified since Japan started to implement the feed-in tariff (FiT) scheme in July 2012. Until now, about one third of the facilities have started operations. Nikkei BP reported that the numbers of certified and operating mega solar power plant among the 300 thousands facilities (1,000kW or higher output capacity) are 3,772 and 909, respectively

According to Nikkei, the total capacities of certified and operating non-residential solar power generation facilities are about 2.8GW and 5.3GW, of which 16GW and 1.6GW are accounted for by mega solar plants. In other words, only about 10% of the certified mega solar plants have started operations.

Besides, numbers of residential solar power generation facilities (~10kW) certified is 544,793, of which 460,858 have started operations. This number represents output capacities of around 2.4GW and 2.1GW, respectively.