Street lighting has always been a significant concern for energy efficiency because it represents 10% to 20% of the electricity used in most countries—sometimes more in developing countries. Street lighting faces many problems. Some of these are:
- Street lights left ON during the day, lead to wastage of electricity
- Inadequate/poor fault managing mechanism leads to a delayed repair of the faulty lights
- Non-uniform light intensity levels, lead to energy waste
- No tool to check the power theft and leak from the lines meant for the street lighting supply, leading to revenue loss
Switching to LED's is not enough to save the energy that is wasted in the above-listed methods. To use the street lighting in an energy-efficient manner, a smart, intelligent wireless sensor network of the internet of things (IoT) enabled device has to be installed to monitor and control the light system and to send the real-time data along with the location to the secured cloud.
A web-based remote cloud dashboard helps track and control the actual power consumption of the street lights. With cloud data analytics, service providers can better manage the information and can take appropriate energy consumption reduction measures to improve efficiency and conservation efforts by better managing and controlling the street lights to save energy.
The following benefits are foreseen with the IoT based solution:
- Time-based scheduling ON/OFF of street lights
- Energy conservation mode enabled during peak hours
- Demand-side management through dimming of lights during non-peak hours
- Monitoring of energy consumed for street lighting
- Tracking of faulty street lights
- Energy theft monitoring
- Energy leak detection
This IoT solution will reduce emissions and power consumption by making street lights efficient. Analyzing data and creating actionable insights can improve operations, lower cost, and decrease inefficiencies for service providers and their partners.
