Panasonic bets on green tech for the home Video

Panasonic bets on green tech for the home Video Transcript

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>> Hi. This is Martin LaMonica from CNET. I'm at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, where there's a lot of talk of green tech this year. And far away from a sustainable planet zone, where smaller companies have solar charges and that sort of thing, there are energy related products and eco products from the big consumer electronics companies. Panasonic has this whole room dedicated their energy offering of the future, and they see it as an area for growth in the long term. And here's some of the components, many of which are already available in Japan, and eventually, probably over the next five or ten years, will be available in the US. This is a really interesting product. It's a fuel cell. It uses the natural gas from gas lines, converts that to electricity, and captures the wasted heat from that to heat your hot water, which is kind of interesting combined heat and power approach. And also, Panasonic just bought Sanyo, and Sanyo, of course, makes solar panels. So in addition to solar panels, they have a lot of other technologies that they can use for home energy. They have batteries. They're in our laptops and cell phones. Well, they developed a home energy backup system for storing solar power at night. They're also doing LED bulbs, and they have a whole line of appliances that they can make more energy efficient. Another interesting product that they're showing here is a home energy management system, which you would use through your TV, of course. And you can how much energy you're using, see your natural gas and water use, but also remotely control things, schedule things to take advantage of off-peak rates. So all together, Panasonic sees it as a long-term bet that energy and efficiency is gonna be something that consumers will go for. ^M00:01:38 [ Music ]