The Future of Smart Street Lighting

With cities rapidly urbanizing, city planners are looking for ways to make their infrastructure more efficient. Smart street lighting provides a way for cities to monitor security, lower electricity costs, and reduce energy consumption. Installing smart street lighting is one of the most popular ways to promote environmental practices on a citywide scale.

A smart street light is an outdoor lighting fixture that uses smart technology to improve city efficiency and safety. The technology can include cameras, photocells, motion sensors, and more. Typically, a central management system controls the entire lighting process. The management software gathers and analyzes data that cities can access and use to optimize energy usage.

Smart street light poles can exist anywhere from sidewalks, to intersections, to parking lots. On the surface, they appear no different than standard street lamps, making it easy for them to fit in any cityscape. They often use LED lighting because of its energy saving benefits.

Smart street lights provide the proper amount of light based on time of day, weather, and motion presence. They use a variety of sensors to detect and adapt to changing city patterns. Their main purpose is to improve the quality of life for citizens.

The technology of smart LED street lights depends on what features they possess. The most basic feature of smart street lighting are light sensors that allow them to turn on at dusk and off at dawn.

The next most common feature is street light cameras and/or motion sensors. These work primarily for pattern recognition, such as pedestrian and traffic monitoring.

Some smart street lights also have solar power and environmental monitoring capabilities. They can analyze conditions like temperature, humidity, flood levels, air quality, and more.

What all smart street lights have in common is connectivity. The smart grid allows every smart street lamp in a city to connect and operate from a central management software. By having centralized lighting controls, tasks like maintenance and analyzing data become much more simple.

Intelligent street lighting has the ability to produce significant benefits for cities with a relatively small investment in comparison.

Energy Costs

Normal street lamps can increase a city’s utility bill by up to 38 percent. Smart streetlights, on the other hand, are energy efficient and can reduce city energy costs by 50 to 75 percent. Adaptive lighting is one of the best ways for city planners to lower their expenses.

LED street lights have lower repair and maintenance costs because of the bulbs’ longer lifespans. Almost all smart street lights operating today have LED bulbs because of their high efficiency ratings and environmental benefits.

Environmental

Smart street lamps significantly reduce carbon emissions and light pollution. Environmental monitoring provides real-time measurements that data analysts can use to improve sustainability. Cities that want to lessen the harm they contribute to the environment can make huge cuts by installing a smart lighting system.

Utility Services

Smart street light posts can assist with traffic control, monitoring traffic patterns, intersections, and parking lots. They also have abilities to notify whenever there are outages in real time, decreasing maintenance response times.

Smart technology in general can provide utility companies and municipal services with more comprehensive intelligence to improve the function of a city overall.

Safety

Smart city lights are also helpful for surveillance and crime prevention. Investigations can use things like license plate and facial recognition to track down suspects.

They also improve pedestrian safety through night lighting and movement tracking with cameras. Sensors that detect sound can pick up gunfire, broken glass, or car crashes and send immediate notifications to authorities.

With surveillance, there comes the concern with privacy, but smart lighting developers are adamant about pushing for transparency. Who can access citizen data, and when, is vital to the success of smart technology integration.

Europe has been the leading users of smart street lighting up until 2023. But with new environmental policies enacting on both the federal and state level, North America is speeding past them.

Chicago is currently in the process of a four-year initiative to replace 270,000 city lights with LED smart lights. The city expects to save $10 million per year on energy costs with the plan.

San Diego implemented smart street lighting that monitors intersections. The lamps provide data that details which areas are unsafe and would benefit from redesigning.

As of 2020, Miami is the global leader in smart street lighting systems. The city council pledged to achieve a 25 percent reduction in carbon emissions across the board. Installing LED smart street lights was a major part of that initiative.

Implementing smart street lighting is just one part of a larger smart city initiative. The goal of creating smart cities is to improve quality of life, foster economic growth, and increase municipal efficiency.

The number of installed smart street lights has tripled globally since 2018. City planners' desire to reduce emissions and lower energy costs is the primary fuel for such exponential growth. Cities are constantly changing, and smart technology allows for street lighting to adapt with them.

HomElectrical offers our own range of outdoor smart LED street lights. Browse our selection here and start your upgrade to smart street lighting.