Connected Street Lighting

Street lighting in its many forms—roadway lighting, tunnel lighting, car park lighting, and urban lighting—is a major consumer of electricity. For municipalities and businesses with large facilities, street lighting is a significant portion of operational expenses. Street lighting is also a vital part of public safety. Ensuring that street lights are reliably on and at the optimal illumination level for pedestrian and vehicle traffic is critical to public safety and the operators’ liability. As a result, any improvements to energy usage, operational reliability, and maintenance costs provide significant payback for the organizations responsible for that street lighting. There are, of course, obvious added benefits to the environment as energy usage is lowered.

G3-ALLIANCE is the natural choice for automating street lighting networks and enables companies and municipalities to reduce operational costs and improve safety. The G3-ALLIANCE system provides a simple solution for adding communication to networks of street lights. This two-way communication enables advanced automation:
• Precision on/off times based on location, the astrological calendar, and weather conditions
• Power-saving dimming during dawn/dusk and deep night
• Traffic control through dimming
• Traffic monitoring
• Lamp failure notification
• Lamp maintenance notification based on temperature, current, PF, or operational hours
• Emergency on/off/intensity control
• Real-time monitoring of energy consumption

PLC delivers a range of advantages over wireless communication systems. Like wireless, no new wires are required. But with PLC, communication is maintained even underground, through walls, and around corners. The communication channel is owned by the operator or utility, so the risks of sharing bandwidth are eliminated. PLC has no line-of-sight limitation and is not affected by weather. Additionally, since PLC uses the powerline, it can detect when there is a line break and its approximate location.

G3-Alliance member Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE:6723), a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, announced that Panasonic Corporation (“Panasonic”) has adopted Renesas’ R9A06G037 power line communication (PLC) IC for its new railway platform lighting control system. For more information, please visit the following page: https://www.renesas.com/br/en/about/press-center/news/2020/news20200326.html

Vattenfall has installed a connected lighting system in Sweden based on G3-ALLIANCE as you can read here.

Read more about G3-ALLIANCE and G3-Hybrid for connected lighting systems here.

Whitepapers:

– Powerline Communications for Street Lighting Automation

– Smart Street Lighting as a Smart City Platform – Applications and Connectivity Best Practices