Electricity utilities that resist the global move toward LED and smart controlled street lighting are ignoring a golden opportunity to improve their service, and even risk losing control of the eventual transition.

That is the view of Scotty Hutto, who oversaw one of the world’s largest LED and smart control street lighting retrofits for US utility Georgia Power.

Mr Hutto will be one of more than 30 experts to present at the 3rd International Street Lighting and Smart Controls Conference, set to be held in Brisbane, Australia, March 14 to 17.

Five years ago, Georgia Power began investigating emerging LED street lighting technology. Municipalities then started requesting LED lights and smart controls be installed on the Georgia Power-owned poles.

“Looking at the cost of LEDs five years ago, the first cost was prohibitive, but the energy savings and improvement in light quality were dramatic,” Hutto says.

“We started looking more towards what would it take for us to do this retrofit, not only just to provide the LEDs, but also to provide the smart controls, because quite a few of our customers (the Municipalities, known in Australia as Local Government Councils) wanted to have some level of control over their lighting.

“Councils wanted to look at the advanced features, the advanced capabilities of LEDs beyond just the energy savings and the improved lighting.”

Interest from councils was very quickly followed by pressure from Georgia Power’s competitors.

“We had vendors coming to our street lighting customers and saying, "Take down Georgia Power's lights, and we'll put up new lights for you, and you can borrow the money by issuing bonds," Mr Hutto recalls.

The utility’s expert team worked closely with its lighting vendors to see technology developed that would meet its requirements.

Now, Georgia Power’s LED and smart control roll-outiswell-advanced; 96,000 LEDs and smart controls were installed last year, bringing the total to 180,000 fully installed. Full deployment will see ­850,000 fixtures (including backyard lights) converted – although Mr Hutto would like to see the deployment reach 900,000 fixtures, or even a million.

 
A commercially viable choice

As an investor-owned public company with a responsibility to deliver profits for its shareholders, Georgia Power needed to ensure the deployment was commercially viable. The energy savings from the new technology is used to offset the cost of the retrofit.

“Councils’ monthly bills remain essentially flat, because we captured the energy savings to help pay for the fixture and control,” Mr Hutto says.

“We're receiving very positive feedback from local governments, as well as residents and drivers, about the improved experience with the LED roadway lights.

“The councils got the improved product; the white light, the capability to dim and control. They can count the energy savings toward different goals, such as carbon reduction, and all of this with no out of pocket expense to them. They are paying the same monthly fee as they paid for the old light.”

The utility has also reaped the benefit of a 25% reduction in maintenance costs.

“Again, we capture those savings, and that goes towards the retirement of our expense for the fixture. We are still a regulated utility withregulatedtariff. If indeed we do see additional savings on maintenance or some other feature of it in the future, it will put downward pressure on those tariffs (the price offered to consumers), but right now they are based on the experience we have and engineering calculations,” Mr Hutto says.

And, the smart controls installed have transformed the utility’s maintenance schedule and asset management.

“We can now plan our maintenance better – but a large thing for us is to ensure that we have an accurate property management system that tells us where all of our lights are,” Mr Hutto says.

“Where we've got this technology installed, we can look at that light and our trucks can take the GPS location and have driving directions quite literally to the base of the pole. This ensures we repair the right light.

“A lot of times we are able to know before our distribution system partners when there has been a pole knocked down,because we'll get a notification from the light pole.”

The high cost of doing nothing

Mr Hutto says any electricity utility resisting the changeover to LEDs and failing to embrace the possibilities of smart controls is “missing out on a huge opportunity”.

“Our experience in the US is that councils and the general public want that improved colour rendering. Our police departments rave about the improved visibility,” he says.

“If you can get in front of it and offer this to your councils either prior to them knowing they want it or as soon as they know they want it, it upgrades the perception of the utility.”

Although he stresses that it is an extreme example, Hutto says some utilities have lost control of the street lighting assets.

“There are other, smaller electricity utilities that serve pockets across the state. Some of them have been resistant, and they have actually been put in a situation where their customers, in this case, the councils have demanded a change to LEDs once they've seen what's happened in other places,” he says.

“When a utility was reluctant to change to LEDs, we have had cities actually take over the street lighting either through legislative action or by other means.

“I believe the transition to LEDs is going to happen eventually. If you wait too long, you may not have a lot of control over how it's done.”

Mr Hutto expects that within three years, Georgia Power will be rolling out additional ‘smart city’ capabilities.

“That's when we are really going to focus on adding features such as being able to tie into traffic control systems to take traffic counts and modulate the lighting,” he says.

This includes using the technology to potentially save lives.

“Our plans are to connect to our E911 system, so when someone dials 911 in an emergency, they will actually allow the dispatcher to automatically flash the street light closest to the place it is occurring. This will help first responders identify that they are in the right area,” Mr Hutto says.

The 3rd International Street Lighting and Smart Control Conference will bring together conference speakers from around the world, chosen for their expertise, knowledge and experience in digital lighting technologies.

Visitwww.streetlightingconference.com.auto register and for more information.