Smart lighting is the current killer app for smart cities, Silver Spring Network exec says
Sean Tippett, director of business development and IoT for Silver Spring Networks, said that the deployment of an smart lighting and control system provides an ideal platform for multiple smart city services, including smart parking meters, traffic lights and traffic management systems. Municipal utilities also have the opportunity to leverage smart city infrastructure for smart grid applications such as advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), demand response (DR) and distribution automation (DA).
By replacing existing street lights with LED-based lamps, utilities and other street light operators can cut energy and operations costs by 50%, the executive added. Networking those LEDs delivers an even faster return on investment (ROI), taking the payback period down to 6 vs. 8 years, as a result of features such as remote management and faster outage response, according to Silver Spring Networks.
In addition, networked street lights provide continuous and accurate status information to operators, enabling them to identify outages immediately. Due to their longer life and automated outage detection, networked LED lamps can eliminate up to 90% of truck rolls and reduce repair and maintenance costs through more precise crew dispatch, the company said.
Silver Spring’s street light management software also provides predictive information, alerting operators to lamps approaching end-of-life, so replacements can be scheduled proactively.
With little incremental cost, the network for street lights can also serve other smart city and smart grid applications, such as traffic light controls, smart parking, traffic management, EV charging stations, DR, DA, and AMI, making it easy to expand smart city initiatives.
A clear example of the benefits of the implementation of smart street lights can be seen in Paris, France. In order to reduce public lighting energy consumption, the city government had selected Silver Spring to implement project pilot including integrated smart street lighting, traffic signal controls, and an IPv6-based multi-application network to achieve immediate savings, strengthen the communications fabric and reduce risk. For this specific project, the U.S company had expanded the functionality of its smart infrastructure platform to support smart city solutions such as intelligent street lighting, traffic signal control, and electric vehicle charging, among others.
