Robots pitched to fill labour gap as Japan eyes offshore wind expansion

CBC

10-04-2025

What on Earth? | CBC News | Posted: April 10, 2025 6:23 PM | Last Updated: Just now
Also: Rescuing native plants from bulldozers and new development
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Robots pitched to fill labour gap as Japan eyes offshore wind expansion
Image | Full Depth team underwater robot
Caption: Employees at Full Depth, a Tokyo-based company, show off an underwater robot that they hope will be used to inspect offshore wind turbines. (Cathy Senay/CBC)
Etsuro Imamura stands in front of a small pool using a controller. But he's not playing a video game — he's demonstrating the future 'employee' for what he sees as a necessary yet dangerous line of work in Japan.
Imamura works for Full Depth, a small company in Tokyo, which has developed a robot that can be used to inspect the underwater infrastructure of offshore wind turbines. The robot's camera sends live video to a laptop so that the operator can look for cracks and other damage, or signs of instability.
That kind of work was previously done by human divers. But Imamura suggests that there aren't enough people for those jobs now, because of the aging population and that younger people aren't interested in becoming divers because it is a "very dangerousʺ job.
Japan has the oldest population in the world, according to the World Economic Forum, which has led to a labour shortage that is forecast to grow. And so, some Japanese companies are turning to robots for help.
New jobs as Japan develops wind power
Like Canada, Japan has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2050, and so the government has been forced to review its energy policy.
After the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in March 2011, the Japanese government shut down all of the country's commercial reactors for checks. That move forced the country to rely on fossil fuels, which now account for more than two-thirds of the country's power generation and make the power sector Japan's largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.
The first large-scale commercial offshore wind power project in Japan, in the Akita area on the northwestern coast, has been in operation for just over two years. Soichi Inoue, president and CEO of Akita Offshore Wind Corporation, says the construction of offshore wind turbines will create new inspection jobs, as well as opportunities to develop new robot technology.
He offers tours to drum up interest in the transition to renewable energy jobs. ʺWe have several visitors from schools, junior high schools, high schools, colleges, universities. They are coming to see our site and we explain to them what we do," he said. "We also invite companies that are developing the technology: drones or robots.ʺ
In the city of Yokohama, Japanese multinational Toshiba is getting in the game, too. Senior manager Yoshihiro Taniyama acknowledges the future growth of offshore wind in Japan.
"We'll need manpower," Taniyama warned, "But humans won't be enough for this job."
That's why Toshiba has been testing a drone that can inspect the blades of a wind turbine. It hopes to have it operational by 2028.
It's also developing a specialized robot to inspect and maintain offshore wind turbines. On that robot, a mechanical arm can reach into the wind turbine's nacelle, the housing at the top of the tower that contains the generator and other components that convert wind energy into electricity.
Media Audio | What On Earth : The secret to Japan's wind power industry? Robots!
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Wind power makes up a small fraction of Japan's power generation today — about one per cent. And most of the wind power produced so far is from onshore wind turbines. But with its densely populated land and extensive coastline, there's a lot of potential for offshore wind.
Toshiba calculates that robot technology could reduce inspection and maintenance costs by 25 per cent. The robots are faster at inspecting wind turbines than humans, which means the turbines are stopped for a shorter period of time, says Toshiba's Taniyama.
"The less we stop offshore wind turbines, the more electricity they can generate," he said.
"My dream is to provide robot technology to all future offshore wind turbine plants in Japan.ʺ
— Cathy Senay
Cathy Senay is CBC's journalist at the National Assembly in Quebec City. She traveled to Japan in January with the media fellowship program of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.
Check out our podcast and radio show. In one of our newest episodes: Students at some of Canada's top universities are demanding banks stop funding fossil fuel projects and are calling on their schools to cut ties with major financial institutions. What On Earth's youth climate action columnist Aishwarya Puttur explains the lengths that students are going to — from confronting bank executives to picking up protest signs — to support the cause, racking up some wins in their campaign along the way.
Media Audio | What On Earth : These students want to boot big banks from campus
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What On Earth drops new podcast episodes every Wednesday and Saturday. You can find them on your favourite podcast app or on demand at CBC Listen. The radio show airs Sundays at 11 a.m., 11:30 a.m. in Newfoundland and Labrador.
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Reader Feedback
Last week, we featured a story about a Quebec community that is making it mandatory for homeowners to have a tree in their front yard to reduce the urban heat island effect in a warming climate, and taxing those who don't plant a tree.
Philip Lucas wrote: "The idea sounds good, though we need to look at more than the tree being a symbol and benefit to climate change. Does the community have a plan to manage the trees? Yearly pruning and disease control? Or is this left to the inexperienced home owner at their expense? What about climate changes we can expect in the next decade, or century? Will we see floods, extreme wind and ice events, and what damage mature trees will do to infrastructure? The community needs a plan to remove mature trees and use the wood productively, replant new trees all as part of municipal maintenance. Too often public policy is simply a 30-second sound bite, much like Trump policy statements, and little thought to the longer term effects of the 'idea'."
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The Big Picture: How will the cougar cross the 10-lane freeway?
Los Angeles County animals such as mountain lions and lizards will soon be able to cross over 10 lanes of the Ventura Freeway thanks to the recent addition of soil over the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing.
The bridge will be the largest wildlife crossing in the world, according to the Annenberg Foundation, crossing over the busy stretch of Highway 101 where it connects two parts of the Santa Monica mountain range.
Once completed, the bridge, which is 64 metres long and 53 metres wide, will help prevent animals from being hit by traffic. It's estimated that vehicles hit large animals one to two million times each year in the U.S.
State Farm, the country's largest insurer of cars, estimated that from July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024, more than 1.8 million insurance claims involving animal collisions were filed across the industry.
Research shows that wider structures encourage more animals to use these crossings.
The soil, an engineered mix including light rocks and compost, will eventually be home to 5,000 native plants. Covering the entire surface of the bridge with 4,500 cubic metres of soil will take several weeks, but officials say that planting can begin in May weather-permitting.
The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is designed to be part of the natural environment. Planting native flora and keeping out invasive species will help the area be more resilient to climate events, Robert Rock, the landscape article who led the design, told The Guardian.
The crossing also has its own native plant nursery where it has a collection of over one million seeds from hyper-local species.
The bridge, which broke ground in 2022, aims to be completed by the end of 2026.
Canada has worked towards building similar wildlife crossings, like underpasses and overpasses in Alberta, including ones used by bears in Banff National Park.
— Hayley Reid-Ginis
This group digs up and saves thousands of native plants from bulldozers at private development sites
Image | Friends of Fish Creek - Katrina Terrill
Caption: The Friends of Fish Creek Park Society says it'll take generations to restore native plants across the provincial park. (Dave Gilson/CBC)
A Calgary group is leading the effort to restore native plants to Fish Creek Provincial Park — by rescuing them from private development sites before they're bulldozed over.
The Friends of Fish Creek Provincial Park Society, in partnership with Alberta Native Plant Rescue, began the pilot project in 2024.
Last year, they salvaged more than 15,000 plants and relocated more than 80 per cent of them to the park, according to Katrina Terrill, the society's executive director.
The other 20 per cent went to members of the public and to a nursery space that will supply the park with plants for years to come.
"We're really looking to restore the whole diversity of the grasslands, not just one or two species," she said.
Now, in the program's second year, the group is working with three developers (Genesis Land Development Corp., Calbridge Homes and Qualico Communities) to rescue native plant species on the land before construction takes place, according to Terrill.
"Because we're going to multiple different salvage sites, we're taking plants from all across these areas. We're able to put them in the park and have this really incredible diversity of species as well as individual genetics," she said. "That's much healthier for the ecosystem in total."
Image | Friends of Fish Creek restoration
Caption: Most of the park's native grassland habitat has disappeared, according to The Friends of Fish Creek Park Society. (Dave Gilson/CBC)
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The group plans to take some plants from the site of Qualico Communities' Southbow Landing development, near Cochrane's southern boundary.
"It does have a lot of that natural space," said Emily Smith, Qualico Communities director of marketing and customer care.
"We want to keep as much of that as we can. But also, knowing that we can't keep all of it, if we can contribute to areas that need [native plants], why wouldn't we?"
The site is under development now, but according to Smith, much of it hasn't been touched yet, including land along the Bow River where native plants are growing.
"These are areas that are essentially sitting and waiting to be developed. So they're kind of the perfect opportunity for groups like these to come in before any construction work happens," said Smith.
Terrill said she's mainly looking for plant species like rough fescue and oat grass to put into the park, but also plants like wild rose, Saskatoon berries and sage grass.
"Long term, it's going to increase the resiliency of the park," Terrill said. "Native plants are more drought tolerant, so they're going to survive better in changing conditions. They're also a lot more tolerant to fire and present a lower fire risk because they don't grow as much over ground."
Most of the restoration work for the program is happening in the Bow Valley Day Use Area — where new plants are being put directly into the ground.
Less than one per cent of native grasslands that once swept across the Fish Creek Provincial Park area are left, according to Terrill.
"We have a huge task ahead of us, for sure. Obviously, restoring the park is going to be the work of generations. It's not going to all happen within the next five to 10 years," said Terrill.
The group is also planting trees and shrubs along the creek to stabilize the bank and create shade for fish.
In a statement, Genesis Land Development Corp. said it's proud to support the restoration program.
The developer added it's sharing seeds from these native plants with homeowners moving into its Logan Landing community, to help "carry that connection to the land forward."
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