Traditional street lighting has been a cost drain on cities and towns and can often account for up to 40 percent of a municipality’s electric bill. This could explain why many cities and towns (looking for ways to cut budgets) have actually been turning off street lights over the last decade. Of course there has to be a better solution!
Smart LED street lights can save 50-70 per cent on electricity over standard bulbs. With those savings, the new lights can apparently pay for themselves in five years or so.
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More interestingly, LED street lights could also monitor things like traffic and crime. The idea is that LEDs (with their digital facilities, including sensor and network connections) could be intelligent cogs in a wheel collecting and disseminating data for commercial and industrial customers. Cities might use streetlight sensors to monitor and manage traffic, crime, air quality and many other things. Major retail chains might even use LED-based ‘visible light communication’ (VLC) technology to monitor shoppers around physical stores and entice them with tailored promotions that the retailer sends to individuals’ phones.
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These ideas are no longer just notions. For example, GE is piloting smart street lighting in San Diego and in Jacksonville, Florida, where sensors mounted on luminaires are helping with things like traffic and emergency response. Public outdoor smart city lighting schemes are also taking hold in other cities around the world, supporting a wide variety of operations such as parking, traffic, air quality, noise and even monitoring the bird population.
As of September 2015, GE began working with SST Inc. to use SST’s ShotSpotter acoustic sensor technology to detect gunshots, which could link into police force and public safety operations.
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For GE, this is part of an ‘industrial internet’ strategy to digitally connect the tools and objects of the industrial world. GE’s goal is to embed and connect sensors everywhere possible, whether it’s jet engines, gas turbines, locomotives or light bulbs. Those networked sensors would allow customers to gather data that helps them run the assets more efficiently, as well as leverage the data for other business purposes, such as analyzing shoppers’ movements. The LED-linked information will be fed into GE’s cloud-based analytical software Predix that scrutinizes mountains of data.
Companies such as GE are ceasing to treat light bulbs as a sales and profit item, instead considering them as a tool and a cost in a radically reshaped model.
This technology and service offering will ultimately drive energy efficiency and reduce costs. The combination of LEDs and analytics puts a computer where a light bulb used to be! All this technology…be it sensors, communications, data storage and processing… just screams out for advanced materials.
If you would like to read more, just click on http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/ge-spotlights-new-smart-street-lamps/ and http://luxreview.com/article/2015/10/will-the-breakup-of-ge-lighting-work-
Until soon… Ian
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