TOKYO >> The Japanese government plans to set up a new subsidy program to install renewable-energy sources such as solar panels and batteries at schools, hospitals and other facilities that are used as evacuation centers.

The program aims to provide alternative power when outages occur during a disaster. Funding was to be included in a new economic package presented in December.

The Environment Ministry has been working on the amount of subsidies to be provided, arranging to include the program in the government’s fiscal 2019 supplementary budget; the fiscal year ends in March. The new subsidies will cover public school buildings, municipal offices and hospitals.

The move comes after a series of large-scale power outages caused by recent typhoons and torrential rains, and is designed to improve the stability of the power supply in facilities used during disasters.

The government is recommending that facilities install these systems by the summer, a season when typhoons approaching Japan generally increase.

The government is pushing for installation of both energy generators and storage batteries to increase the availability of power as well as electrical storage capacity. Storage batteries are particularly costly and would be difficult for each facility to purchase without the subsidy.

The government also plans to require each facility to cut their power consumption by half before power generators are installed. This would make them similar to a Net Zero Energy Building, or ZEB, which is energy self-sufficient. The ZEB standard does not include storage batteries.

But the inclusion of batteries will allow buildings to store power generated by solar panels and enable a stable power supply at night and even in bad weather.

In September 2018, a magnitute 6.6 earthquake caused a large-scale blackout in almost all areas of Hokkaido. Yet one company in Sapporo, housed in a ZEB, was supplied with electricity and operated without incident.

“I was relieved that I was able to charge my cell phone,” said one company worker. “Large storage batteries are expensive, but we will be better equipped with a (government-subsidized) system.”