Street lights today serve a purpose beyond making a place safer. A quiet but powerful transformation over the past decade has allowed them to become active contributors towards utility efficiency. IoT sensors, smart meters, real-time data monitoring; all these elements come together in creating an adaptive and responsive utility infrastructure. One that can allow stakeholders to get a better grip on grid performance, health, maintenance and diagnostics.
The result? Not only the overall performance is improved, but hidden problems are identified sooner — bringing down overhead costs and improving the bottom line. Street lights have basically become nodes in a larger ecosystem. With the ability to communicate and a pavement for operational insight, energy conversation goals are also achieved sooner. But, the question remains, how are all of these achieved?
Smart Street Lighting: Just a Namesake?
When we talk about street lighting, the general perception is that they just illuminate. Smart streetlights, with IoT sensors are more like a helping hand. They can turn on or dim the lights by detecting people or vehicular presence. And that’s not even all. These streetlights collect all sorts of information- the weather data or how bright or dark the outside is. What time of the night has the most number or least number of people on the street? Data points like these become an important driver in ensuring roads are safer, accidents are reduced and energy waste is eliminated.
But, how can utilities use this data to their advantage? With information being collected in near real-time, how can organizations reap the benefits? By the time a piece of data is processed, analyzed and reacted upon manually, it would already have become outdated. Data is collected and utilized. But efficiency is not achieved.
So, what is the solution?
The answer- operational intelligence.
How Smart Streetlights Help Improve Utility Efficiency?
Making the most of smart streetlight investments will involve more than additional technological upgrades. The onus lies on organizations in how they interpret and interact with the incoming data. Here, solutions like Grid become a key player. As a central command center, the platform automates the cycle of data collection, analysis, workflow triggers (if anomalies are detected), and detailed analytics to improve business processes. Now, these analytics are not static dashboards that get updated once every few hours. Grid has live dashboards that act as a bird-eye view on every aspect of the street light ecosystem, updating data changes as they occur in real-time.
Let’s take a look at how utility operations are lit up with smart street lighting and the critical role of platforms like Grid in that context,
Dynamic lighting control: Data-driven scheduling in action
Streetlights generally followed rigid schedules. They were set up to turn on at dusk, and off at dawn, to avoid wastage of light during the day. However, elements like changing weather patterns, or traffic can vary. A sunny day can suddenly change into a dingy noon, with clouds hovering all over. Roads can become darker, traffic might become tougher to navigate. Events can happen.
With a data analytics platform (Grid), it becomes easier to overcome the complexities of rigid schedules. As the central system begins to understand patterns like weather changes or traffic flow, it can be set up to trigger certain actions as a response.
Streetlight sensors feed data about traffic as well as pedestrian movement. Grid processes this data in real-time to identify time of the day when traffic is at peak. This also involves analyzing traffic flow, ambient levels in lighting, or environmental factors to determine when the streetlight needs to be activated. If an area has very low-traffic during specific hours, the lights can be dimmed or even turned off. This means lights are used only when required. Energy waste is reduced and all that while maintaining functionality of the roads.
Full visibility, zero downtime: Remote monitoring and control
Erstwhile manual inspections which were conducted previously to identify faults or outages used to take a lot of time, effort and increased operational costs. For any Ops team today, asset visibility is a prerequisite to efficient management. A greater grip over operations within the lighting network is what utilities need to achieve enhanced visibility.
Every data point that is collected from streetlight sensors or other IoT devices is consolidated by Grid into a centralized dashboard. Field operators can view and receive updates on asset status, power consumption, fault alerts and more. And all of this is happening in real time. Data variations including spikes in consumption or streetlight not communicating data are highlighted and get auto-flagged as anomalies.
Whenever instances of flickering voltages or an outage happen, the sensors immediately push this data to Grid. Our solution’s task management capabilities flags this event and sends an alert to the maintenance team. The alert will have details like diagnostic information, location and probable reasons for the fault. Grid’s WFM (workforce management) features ensure that the job is assigned to the most suitable technician, within close proximity and possessing the required skill set.
Decoding the data: Turning insight into action
Smart street lights are continuously collecting data at all times. Sensors monitoring brightness levels, weather APIs tracking weather conditions or traffic counters identifying footfall. But, unless transformed into something meaningful, raw data is just noise. Grid’s SMOC changes all that.
SMOC is like the brain of the street light ecosystem, that refines all data into insights that provide value. Grid pulls in data from data points in real-time —- lighting levels, weather events, power use, dimming levels, pedestrian movement, vehicular traffic, and more. What’s more important is that this data is ingested via SMOC’s data pipeline. Utilities now do not have to juggle separate dashboards to view information.
As the data gets structured, it is run through a series of frameworks, rules, predictive models, etc. Let’s say a light is consuming more energy than average although there is no traffic correlation. The SMOC flags it as an anomaly for inspection.
Grid’s customizable dashboards also help refine insights for enhanced decision making in utility leadership. KPIs like energy consumption per district, the average uptime duration for each streetlight, or the number of resolved outages over a month can be set up as per business preference. The dashboards can also be made shareable across teams — leadership, executive, and field operations. As a result, decisions are made on concrete foundations with every stakeholder operating from a single source of truth.
Conclusion: A New Era of Efficiency?
As we saw, smart streetlights continuously generate data almost instantaneously. This data in itself will not reap benefits for organizations. The information has to be fed into a central command center, apt analysis has to be done and workflows need to set in place. It is not just about intelligence at this point. Utilities should be able to act swifter, operate smarter and plan better. Grid’s suite of tools —- SMOC (smart meter operations center), WFM (workforce management), BPM (business process management), data warehousing, etc, enables leaders to not just stay relevant, but redefine what’s possible in streetlight operations.
For utilities who are ready to embrace this transformation, connect with our team today and understand how you can make your future brighter. Literally and figuratively.
