9 companies, Fujisawa City to collaborate on sustainable smart town project

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Panasonic Corp and eight other companies that are spearheading advanced environmental initiatives through eco-conscious urban development and smart city projects will work together to implement a smart town concept called “Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town” (Fujisawa SST), which showcases Panasonic’s “entire solutions” business model in full scale to the world.

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.

The eight other companies are Accenture, Mitsui & Co, Mitsui Fudosan Co, Nihon Sekkei, ORIX Corp, PanaHome Corp, Sumitomo Trust & Banking Co and Tokyo Gas. Panasonic and Fujisawa City in Kanagawa Prefecture, situated about 50 km west of Tokyo, reached a basic 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 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 that will have about 1,000 households.

Panasonic will apply its “comprehensive solutions for the entire house, entire building and entire town” to Fujisawa SST, combining its energy technologies and a safe and secure environment. 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, the company plans to pre-install 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. Panasonic intends to replicate Fujisawa SST as a business model in other parts of Japan and overseas.