Energy Saving in Street Lighting

Completed

Energy Efficiency(Other)

Applied Research and Development

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Electrical and Electronic Engineering)

Not Cross-cutting

Mr W Gibson
Plextek Ltd

3

Carbon Trust

01 August 2005

30 July 2006

12 months

£250,000

East of England

Mr W Gibson, Plextek Ltd

The objective of this project is to demonstrate a remote street lighting monitoring and control system that not only has a wide range of energy saving features, but is also sufficiently low cost to make it the first commercially viable solution for the market.

Currently, street lights are controlled by photocells. These have only one function, which is switching lights on and off according to factory-fixed, light-level thresholds. Telensa's proposed system operates by replacing the traditional photocell with an 'outstation'. This performs the lamp switching and monitoring functions. It also contains a small radio, which communicates back to the base station or 'hub'. A large deployment would have a number of hubs, which themselves would be connected to a central system computer and database. Switching can be set in various ways, for example by time or by centrally measured light level. The project aims to: show that the innovative radio technology can be used to provide a real, practical and reliable solution to the needs of the street lighting industry; verify the details of the functionality required, and show that the functionality does yield the claimed operational and energy saving benefits; show that the productcan be produced cost-effectively; clear the regulatory path to enable the use of a metered supply for street lighting; show accuracy and flexibility of lighting control that will enable the elimination of waste and the 'fine tuning' of burning hours, leading to energy cost savings; show a range of continuously and periodically monitored electrical parameters that can be used to provide prompt lamp failure notifications and operating performance statistics; show diagnosis of operatingpower factor and potential for power factor improvement; meter energy consumption; investigate the practicalities of installation, volume deployment and system set up and configuration; explore, understand and prioritise product design features and system functionality for a fully commercial syste

01/01/07