Japan's environment ministry requests €61m NatRef subsidy

Japan's Ministry of Environment (MOE) last week asked for ¥8.1 billion (€61 million) in natural refrigerant subsidies for the 2019 financial year (FY). The budget request has been submitted to the Ministry of Finance for review.

The Japanese government is expected to confirm the actual budget amount in early 2019.

For FY 2018, the MOE asked for ¥9.4 billion (€72 million). The actual confirmed amount was ¥6.4 billion (€47 million).

The natural refrigerant subsidy will continue to be available in the same industrial sectors: cold storage, food manufacturing, and food retail.

About Japan’s natural refrigerant subsidy scheme

Since 2014, subsidies have been a major driver of growth in the number of CO₂ stores in Japan as well as NH₃/CO₂ cold store facilities.

The stated goal of the subsidy is to encourage the “shift to natural refrigerants […] and to widely promote the use of energy-efficient equipment”.

Japan’s Ministry of the Environment says that the subsidy aims to “contribute to driving down the cost of natural refrigerant equipment to achieve cost parity with conventional f-gas equipment, and to accelerate the spread of the technology”.