Sharp Corporation is making a concerted effort to reduce environmental impacts to the greatest extent possible at its production facilities around the world, and it is applying its own original evaluation criteria to recognize those plants having an extremely high level of environmental performance as “SuperGreen Factories.”

Our Kameyama plant, the frst such factory to be so recognized, is an integrated, start-to-fnish production facility for liquid-crystal display (LCD) televisions (TVs), from fabricating the LCD panel to assembling the fnished TV set (see Table I). Given that large amounts of energy are consumed to operate production equipment and to power air conditioning, we focused particular attention on environmental measures intended to reduce global warming and introduced an energy supply system that combines environmental friendliness and operational stability. As shown in Figure 1, this system is based on integrating different types of large-scale distributed power sources and consists of a gas-fred cogeneration system, a fuel cell system, and a photovoltaic power generating system. The power output of this system covers about one-third of the total electrical needs of the plant.