Japan looking to sell 'smart' cities to the world

The article on 7th Oct 2010 in Business Week read 'Japan looking to sell smart cities to the world'.


For a minute I thought that this is got to be the craziest idea every! How can someone or even more a country sell a smart city on a commercial scale? But, when I started reading the article it all started making sense. Below I have taken a few points from the article to give you a picture of how they plan to do this.

Recently in Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies, better known as Ceatec, in Chiba-Japan the attraction was the concept of a smart city which was energy efficient in the year 2020. The Japanese have been toying with the idea of creating a smart city which uses energy solely from sun, wind and nuclear. Their goal is to create cities of the future which are carbon emission free and would help reverese the global climate impact. Japan hopes to make this their primary export in the future and help them recover from their current slump.

The city of Yokohama in Japan, is the site of a social and infrastructure experiment to create a smart city. Launched as a pilot project called "Yokohoma Smart City Project" it involves companies such as Nissan Motor Co., Panasonic Corp., Toshiba Corp., Tokyo Electric Power Co., Tokyo Gas Co., Accenture's Japan unit and Meidensha Corp.

The Japanese are treating the pilot smart city project very very seriously and hope to take this concept to other countries very soon. Japan is not the only country in the race to create smart cities of the future which are energy efficient. We see that Australia is in the process of creating a smart grid city in Newcastle in New South Wales and has already invested $100 million. South Korea is even more ambitious and are embarking on a $200 billion smart grid project on their Jeju Island. China is expected to invest $7.3 billion in smart grid and technologies this year. So all-in-all, alot of countries want to be the first to prove to the world that they can create and sell smart cities with smart grid technologies. But more so, it estimated that the global smart grid market will be worth $171.4 bn in 2014 and who wouldn't want to be part of such a large untapped market.

With competiton heating up, Japan hopes to be pioneer in creating smart cities and has already started courting overseas customers in emerging countries where demand for energy has always been higher than supply. The challenge though remains, for Japan and many other countries, in the race to create smart energy efficient cities to not just talk but walk the talk!