Smart Grid in Street Lights

Street lighting is an important community service, it can consume as much as 40 percent of a city’s energy budget.  street lights are prone and costly to manage, which add to lighting costs. Consequently, street lighting has emerged as a leading smart city application.

By replacing existing street lights with LED-based lamps, utilities and other street light operators can cut energy and operations costs by 50 percent or more.

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.

In addition to near-term savings, a network-based lighting solution 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).

Understanding the operational details of networked LEDs and comparing those benefits and costs to traditional  lighting lays the foundation for building a business case to upgrade street lights. The hard dollar savings in energy and operational costs make the case for replacement, and networked LEDs provide additional community value as well.

 

 

The Advantages of Networked LEDs

Legacy high-pressure sodium and mercury street lamps are not energy efficient and typically operate 12 hours a day at full intensity,; so their energy cost is high. These lamps also have a short life span (around 5 years), resulting in unpredictable and expensive operations. Operators must replace roughly 20 percent of these lamps each year.

Currently, operators detect light outages either when a community member calls to report it or when mobile crews detect outages during periodic checks. Consequently, the time to replace a lamp can vary considerably, impacting public safety and an operator’s liability.

 New energy efficient LED-based street lights have a life span of up to 20 years, enabling lower energy and operations costs. . In order to take full advantage of this new LED technology, these street lights must be networked. Operators benefit from lower energy and operations costs, which can be reduced even further when street lights are connected to a network.

Networking gives operators remote access and advanced functionality, including the ability to dim street lights  and control their runtime by scheduling them to switch on/off as conditions (such as shorter/longer days) warrant. This network-based control yields an additional 10 to 20 percent energy savings beyond just LED replacement, along with greater operations and management savings.

For example, since LEDs burn brighter than conventional street lamps, operators can dim them to 50 percent brightness for additional energy savings with minimal compromise in light output. And, by controlling street light runtime remotely, operators also have the option to eliminate photocells for further cost reduction.

 

Benefits

Energy Savings

Low wattage , Dimming and Reduced Burn Time

Operational Savings

Long life time, Remote Monitoring and  Management , Automatic Outage detection, Proactive Maintanence