Standards, technical regulation and conformity assessment in the Japanese and European offshore wind power market: current implementation and best practices

The study was commissioned by the European Commission and dealt with standards, technical regulation and conformity assessment in the Japanese and European offshore wind power market. We analysed current implementations in Japan and Europe, identified best practices and gave recommendations on which learnings from Europe could be relevant for the development of the offshore wind energy sector in Japan.

The study concludes that due to regulatory shortcomings in the offshore wind energy sector, Japan may struggle to reach its ambitious goals to increase the share of renewables in its energy mix and achieve climate neutrality by 2050. Japan should ideally take measures to streamline and simplify the requirements regarding standardisation and certification and align with some EU best practices to speed up the adoption process of international standards. A clearer separation of tasks related to regulation, accreditation and conformity assessment would avoid duplicative requirements and alleviate doubts of conflict of interest between the different actors.