by Brianna Crandall — June 10, 2011—Panasonic Corporation and eight other companies that are spearheading advanced eco-conscious urban development and smart city projects recently announced they will work together to build a smart town from the ground up. Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town (Fujisawa SST) will showcase Panasonic’s “entire solutions” business model to the world in full scale.
The company will effectively create an advanced model of a town demonstrating efficient use of energy by promoting widespread use of energy-saving devices and proposing new solutions that integrate measures for energy creation, storage and management. Specifically, Panasonic plans to preinstall its solar power generation systems and home-use storage battery systems across the town, including homes, various facilities and public zones, which would be the first of its kind in the world, notes the company.
Panasonic and Fujisawa City, situated about 50 km west of Tokyo, reached an agreement last year to build a smart town on the vacant lot of Panasonic’s former factory site. With an aim to open the new town in the fiscal year ending in March 2014, the business partnership of these nine companies and one city will collaborate to build an innovative smart town deploying services and energy systems based on Panasonic’s Eco Ideas for green lifestyles.
The eight leading companies in alphabetical order are: Accenture, Mitsui & Co.; Mitsui Fudosan Co.; Nihon Sekkei, Inc.; ORIX Corporation; PanaHome Corporation; Sumitomo Trust & Banking Co.; and Tokyo Gas. Each company will use its respective expertise for the benefit of the town. The developers, manufacturers and service providers will work closely together throughout every phase of the project from the master planning stage to actual operation of the town, which will have about 1,000 households.
Panasonic intends to replicate Fujisawa SST as a business model in other parts of Japan and overseas. The city of Fujisawa, in cooperation with the surrounding regions, will also participate in the efforts to globally promote Fujisawa SST as a model project of an environmentally minded city in action.
