Connectivity and communication have been developing rapidly across the country, and modern roadways play a crucial role in making this happen. But for roads to function seamlessly, you need to have an essential mechanism that enables traffic to flow through day and night, i.e street lights.
Though simple-seeming, there has been a lot of progress to upgrade older generation street lights to new, smart (i.e. network-connected) energy-efficient lighting solutions. These have significantly helped lower public utility energy consumption as well as operations and maintenance cost.
While there has been consistent adoption of technological advancements in street lights, the attitude towards the installation and maintenance process isn't the same. Street light projects still employ traditional and outdated methods that could save authorities and contractors a big chunk of their expenditure while increasing productivity simultaneously.
The first stage like with all infrastructure projects is the survey to create a comprehensive rollout plan. In the case of streetlight installation, the surveyors measure pole spans to figure out the amount of lux needed to light the area optimally. Ideally, street light poles are required to be about 29 metres apart but due to various reasons this can change, and hence it becomes essential to calculate the lux which subsequently determines the power of the lamps used. This way, authorities can cut down on heavy energy usage by not opting for high lux lamps and increasing profits in the process.
The Grid Advantage
Using Grid enables companies to manage their entire street lighting program, from installation (which uses similar processes as smart meter installations) to management and the running of a Central Command Management System (CCMS). Grid integrates smoothly with the CCMS to help you get a holistic real-time picture of power distribution network as per the Single Line Diagram.
This lets you identify if any faults arise within the street light network. Grid's robust alerting and notification system highlights any abnormalities in the energy consumed by the network, whether it's higher or lower than normal, hence alerting authorities to the possibility of faulty equipment or electricity theft respectively. Notifications in Grid can be configured to be delivered within the Grid mobile app, via email, both of the above, or even via WhatsApp.
Grid In The Real World
Grid, in collaboration with a SMART Infrastructure company have contributed significantly to one of India's largest advanced smart lighting projects. Grid's No-code framework helped built a data management platform that digitized installation, maintenance and operation of more than 78,000 smart LED lights, along with their corresponding assets.
This was achieved through our RAD technology that only requires you to drag-and-drop the functionalities you require. Using IoT technology, it is even possible for each and every LED light to feed data into Grid and have its status monitored and changed remotely for energy monitoring and O&M.
City planners in-charge of Smart City projects that operate at this scale have found an increase of 85% in data discovering capabilities through Grid's easily configurable dashboards. As a result, the future of Urban Local Bodies is more sustainable than ever, leading to an increased quality of life.
