By Chris Sheedy

In American cities such as Los Angeles and San Diego, smart street lighting is being utilised in an innovative, commercialised and community-friendly fashion to improve the lives of residents and to lower their rates by generating revenue for the cities.

In Los Angeles some of the SmartPole street lights, equipped with energy-efficient LED lighting, also double up as 4G LTE wireless transmitters. Not only do the lights save millions of dollars each year in energy costs, but the ones with 4G transmitters also deliver enhanced and reliable broadband and mobile telephony to local businesses and residents.

San Diego has made their street lights work for the city in a different way. The LED-equipped lights are equipped with a range of sensors to improve services, identify hazards and provide information for work crews. They sense the environment around them and gather data the community needs to improve parking availability, manage traffic, manage garbage collection, be more environmentally friendly and make the city more livable. The lights can even sense pollutants, dangerous gases and smoke, and alert authorities.

“Our residents are thrilled with the lighting upgrades,” says Almis Udrys, Performance and Analytics Department Director with the City of San Diego. Even when they ignore all of the added functionality, Udrys reports, residents say the LED lighting itself improves their lives.

“Residents tell us they feel safer with the new lighting while walking around at night,” he says. “They also note improved visibility and less shadows.”

While some Australian councils and utilities are still wondering whether LED lighting is the way to go, truly smart cities are well on their way to a completely new way of managing their street lighting. IPWEA’s lighting experts from our Street Lighting and Smart Controls Programme shared with us their knowledge on the future of lighting in Australia.

The LED debate is over

“As far as whether it is a good idea to go with LED lighting or not, there is no longer any debate,” says Bryan King, Director of street lighting consultancy Strategic Lighting Partners. “There is no longer any wringing of hands. LED is the new normal. The extension of the discussion is instead around how to integrate smarter features with those LEDs.”

Graham Mawer, Managing Director of Next Energy, says the main issue for many councils in Australia is that their utilities have not been willing to deploy LEDs in large numbers.

“Some are far more progressive, but the pattern varies from utility to utility,” Mawer says. “They’re not necessarily confident about, or familiar with, the new lighting technologies and they face a lack of appropriate incentives. If a utility installs an LED street light they’re going to cut the energy consumption from that light by 50%. On average, they’re also going to cut the maintenance burden by up to 50% and that effects what they can charge.”

Many utilities are being encouraged to allow councils to directly fund and own the street lights, but utilities have traditionally funded and owned the lights and have earned a solid revenue stream from them. “So if you look at the three baskets of charges – the energy, the maintenance, and the finance – the utilities are potentially losing on all three with LEDs,” Mawer says.

LED reliability outshines all else

The City of Los Angeles regularly releases figures around its street lighting successes and the latest data, King says, points to a cumulative failure rate (for any reason) of 1150 lights on 165,000 LED installations from multiple manufacturers since 2009. This is a cumulative failure rate of only 0.7% since 2009.

The same organisation, using traditional high pressure sodium (yellow light) street lighting, previously suffered a 10.5 per cent failure rate annually. Total maintenance jobs have now fallen from 24,000 to 10,000 per year, even with many tens of thousands of non-LED lights still left on the network.

“There’s a massive order of magnitude difference in the reliability rates,” King says. “Many of the energy network companies in Australia have said, in the past, that they must wait until the technology is proven. It now has been. There’s no longer any reason to delay the roll out of an LED street lighting network based on its reliability being unproven.”

Smart cities centre around smart lighting

Despite the fact that the city of San Diego is already so far advanced with its street light program, Udrys says the possibilities are endless.

“We’ve often discussed how inanimate objects can become animate,” he says. “Street lights are just the tip of the iceberg, but there is potential to turn them into more than just objects that shine a light in dark places.”

“Sensors can be installed on street lights to collect environmental data, public safety data, mobility data, not to mention communicate with traffic signals or a smart phone. All of these options provide opportunities for piloting of new technologies that innovators would like to see on the broader market. Each of these options could be monetized depending on the sensors that are installed and the types of data that are collected or shared with our customers/residents.”

King agrees, saying smart street lighting is a tangible entry point into a more practical, bankable, outcome-based system. In other words, street lighting is a platform for a range of smart city functions.

“Street lighting is the first of them because there is an urgent need to save energy, to reduce light pollution and light nuisance and to save carbon,” King says.

“If it’s being done in the right way, a good city manager or utility manager could practically start with street lighting controls as part of a large-scale LED implementation. They would procure a system that allows them to add sensor- based management so they can save money on maintenance, add waste water management functionality, garbage management so bins are only emptied when they are full, sewer and drainage hazard management, traffic and parking management and more.”

This story is an excerpt. The full version ran in the Nov/Dec edition of inspire magazine, pages 34-37. Read the full version here.