OREANDA-NEWS. February 15, 2011.  Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (TOKYO: 6503) today announced that on February 16, it will establish the Smart Community Project Group, a new internal organization designed to support and strengthen the company's involvement in large-scale smart community projects in Japan and overseas. This new organization will engage in new experiments using company resources, cooperate with external organizations and participate in industry-wide projects.

The group, established within Business Planning Office, Mitsubishi Electric's Corporate Marketing Group, will comprise experts representing a variety of the company's divisions in order to utilize technologies and sales channels of the company's energy systems, social infrastructure, information and communications systems, building systems, factory automation systems and home appliances businesses.

"In addition to increasing energy efficiency in homes, buildings, factories and other individual units, Mitsubishi Electric aims to study the creation of smart communities and propose means to use electricity more efficiently through a best-mix of energy for the community as a whole," said Kunio Oguchi, Executive Officer, Corporate Marketing Group. "Mitsubishi Electric's efforts in building smart communities are based on the fundamental principle of establishing "green communities through electrification" that pursue a low carbon environment and comfortable living in equal measure."

Social experiments called smart cities or smart communities are recently garnering attention worldwide as concepts to build cities. To enrich residents' lives through a new, low carbon lifestyle, these initiatives aim to control the consumption of clean energy and other energy resources on a community-wide basis beyond individual units such as homes, buildings or factories.