Tepco: let there be light Are the lights still on at Tokyo Electric Power? The company insists that they are - and the Japanese government is intent on keeping them that way. The country's biggest electricity provider was shaken to the core by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident that happened in March 2011. A recovery plan detailed on Monday alongside full-year results plots a path back to stability. But it relies too much on Japan's continued embrace of nuclear power to be entirely realistic. In a sense, Tepco has already started to turn the corner. It took much of the financial hit for the tragedy in its year to March 2011, so that the latest annual numbers look a little better. The net loss for the year just ended came in at Y782bn ($9.8bn), compared with Y1.2tn a year ago. Moreover, the company forecasts that losses would narrow to Y100bn for the year just started. And the government has agreed to take a controlling 50.1 per cent stake in exchange for a Y1tn capital injection to help meet costs of compensation, decommissioning and the clean-up at the Fukushima nuclear facility. Partial nationalisation should lead to closer co-operation between Tepco and its regulators, speeding up decision-making over its nuclear facilities - all of which are currently closed. The recovery plan, however, rests on some optimistic assumptions. First, Tepco hopes to raise electricity prices by 10 per cent in July (off an already high base). That will be a test of the new relationship with regulators. The plan also assumes that Tepco will be able to bring up to a quarter of its nuclear capacity back into operation next year by restarting the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant (a safety review is under way). Now that Tepco is about to gain a new shareholder (the government), there is little incentive for existing investors to hang around. The lights are on, but they are shining dimly.