Sustainability and Green Investing in Japan

September 30, 2010

By Jeff

So part of the reason for the long absence since my last post is that I moved to Japan. Although I haven’t been able to write anything for awhile due to being so busy from the move, Japan is definitely a great country to be in for exposure to green investing. In honor of being here I’m going to focus my first new post on some of the interesting things I have found here that are related to sustainability and green investing.

The first one is a very cool house called the Camouflage House. Driving around in the country here, you will see greenhouses everywhere. The Camouflage House takes this important physical component of farming life and combines it with the living quarters. The result is a very beautiful structure that is less imposing on the natural scenery surrounding it and that gets more than enough natural sunlight. Considering a greenhouse usually gets enough sunlight to create excessive heat, this house uses Japanese panels and white canvas to help section off parts of the home and reduce undesired heat.

Speaking of heat, one of the other interesting homes I found here was actually just built fairly recently. This new house is certified as a “passive house,” which basically means that it has much more insulation than usual, extremely high performance windows, and a mechanical ventilation system capable of keeping the inhabitants of the house alive without natural ventilation. The idea comes from a concept that originated in Germany which would allow a house to be heated by a hairdryer if it was well insulated enough. Due to this much higher level of insulation, the appliances and occupants can generally create enough heat to heat the home.

To shift the focus more towards investing in green technologies, I also recently came across this article about Panasonic’s plan to shift focus to solar power and other energy saving technologies. As of the time this article was written, Panasonic was the largest producer of plasma-TVs. This isn’t too surprising considering, at least to me, Panasonic’s name still connotes consumer electronics. It is actually this competitive market that drove Panasonic to shift its primary focus to solar.

The change comes in part due to Panasonic’s acquisition of Sanyo, but they plan to add some additional new technologies to the solar power sphere. The technology discussed in the article will let consumers monitor the energy production and consumption of everything in their home — from their television set. This already sounds pretty amazing, but interestingly enough Panasonic claims that this technology could be available to consumers as soon as two or three years from now. It’s hard to say how things will develop with bringing solar power into peoples’ homes, but this is definitely an intriguing technology. I’m curious if any green investment funds have added Panasonic to their portfolio because of this change.

I hope you enjoyed my first post since coming back and please let me know if there are any specific topics you would like me to look into. Until then I’ll just be reading up on sustainability and posting the most interesting things here.

Photo Source: Jeremy Levine Design

Tags: green building in japan, Green Investing, greenhouse house, japan, passivhaus