Smart lighting project to come to Canberra

A seven-year collaboration between Itron, VINCI Energies’ Electrix and Transport Canberra and City Services (TCCS) will create an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) network to support smart city and energy solutions in Canberra.

The project, which is claimed to be the largest standalone smart lighting project in Australia, will see TCCS deploy Itron’s multipurpose network across the region, connecting streetlights on the network that will be managed by Itron’s Streetlight.Vision central management software.

Itron’s Vice President of Commercial and Customer Enablement for the Asia–Pacific region, Paul Nelsen, said its open, standards-based smart city network is “the ideal platform” to help transform Canberra’s critical city services.

With the Energy Performance Contract, Electrix will operate, maintain and upgrade the streetlight network over seven years. This involves replacing over 45,000 of the 80,000 lights on the ACT streetlight network with LED technology, which will save over 80,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions, about 20,000,000 kWh and approximately $2 million in other operation and maintenance costs a year, according to the government.

Initial benefits of the network will include increased electrical safety and energy savings from energy-efficient fittings, which can be tracked with metering on the lights. It will also lead to the development of a Smart City Lab to test and develop additional smart city solutions, including smart waste management, traffic monitoring, pollution sensing and other applications using the same network platform. As part of the upgrade, a new digital control maintenance management system will be delivered to offer real-time monitoring of the network to automatically detect faults such as lamp failures or cable problems.

“Together, we will develop a strategic, scalable process for rolling out smart city applications under a single, unified network,” said Nelsen.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Theerapong