Blog 9:Will Street Lights Become the Nodes of the Networked City?

The article I chose to summarize and write about was on Echelon, Osram and the smart street light network. I read this article from greentechmedia.com and I found it quite interesting. The well-known lighting company “Osram” announced that it was launching its own networked street lighting solution, using technology from San Jose, California based networked street lighting stalwart Echelon. So with these two companies combined, they promise to squeeze up to 40 percent more energy efficiency out of a city or utility street light system, compared to just using high-efficiency lamps alone.

Echelon has been in the electrical industry for more than a decade specializing in connecting streetlights to central control systems. As of now Echelon’s system connects about 1 million street lights around the world and is hoping to install at least 500,000 smart street lights by 2014.

I personally think this is a great idea for their company. I’ve witnessed countless times where I have seen dimmed out streetlights and streetlights at the end of their cycle for that matter. I always that to myself that there must be some way to increase the efficiency of these street lights to make them run longer, because I’m sure we already have enough technology to do so. Osram and Echelon have proved to me that this was possible. They claim that their networked lighting system can squeeze about 30 percent out of energy use of existing streetlight systems as well as reduce operation and maintenance costs down 20 percent.

Most of today’s streetlights remain dumb and inefficient do to the fact that there is no way to actually tell whether the lights are still working or have broken down resulting in lights called “day-burners”,  since they are left on all day.  Osram and Echelon suggest that their network can offer real-time control of the whole functionality of the lights by connecting them to a network.  Given the fact that there are already some LED lights installed in streetlights the Echelon company will make them more efficient by adding networking and sensors which allows you to collect data on energy use over time, both for operations and budgeting purposes and for preventative maintenance and predictive replacement.

This will in total reduce costs, employee hours spent, and fuel burned on emergency truck rolls. LED streetlights also play a role in public safety. They have the power to dim themselves during the day to save energy, or brighten or blink on and off to guide police and paramedics to the scene of an accident or crime. The owner of this company stated that certain private companies can actually buy and own their own city streetlight network form Osram, thus making the company a huge interest in the market where they can make certain partnerships and contracts with other companies.

After reading this article I found out a lot about sustainable energy within streetlights In general. As technology keeps evolving there are many ways to reduce the amount of energy used in different systems that can save a lot of money and labor.

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Will-Street-Lights-Become-the-Nodes-of-the-Networked-City