Glen Eira Smart Lighting Project

Challenge

The City of Glen Eira is an inner suburb of metropolitan Melbourne. The City includes the suburbs of Bentleigh, Bentleigh East, Carnegie, Caulfield, Elsternwick, Gardenvale, Glen Huntly, McKinnon, Murrumbeena, Ormond and parts of Brighton East and St Kilda East. The City’s streets are illuminated at night time by approximately 10,000 street lights, which are owned and maintained by the local utility, United Energy. It is estimated that the majority of street lights in their existing state deliver unnecessarily high levels of illumination and when faulty, are likely to remain unidentified for long periods of time.

Glen Eira engaged SCS and specialist consultancy Ironbark to design and deliver a technology solution that could assist with monitoring and controlling the performance of its street lighting assets in order to provide significant improvements to asset management processes, energy efficiency and service delivery to road users.

Client
City of Glen Eira

Location
Victoria, Australia

SCS Solution
Smart connected street lighting system

Solution

SCS worked with our technology partner Itron to deploy a networked street lighting solution, connecting Glen Eira’s V-category street lights by attaching smart photocell devices to the luminaires. The photocells generate several types of metering data and relay this information via a radio network to access points and subsequently a data centre. A cloud-hosted controls software provides access to the council to view and analyse the data, monitor their assets and send commands to the lights for dynamic switching and dimming.

SCS worked closely with the asset owner United Energy and specialist consultancy Ironbark to develop a solution that will not only meet the City’s needs, but at the same time fulfils the regulatory and utility-specific requirements so it could be approved for deployment. Adding to this, our team developed processes and systems with United Energy to manage ongoing maintenance operations of the smart lighting system.

In order to help Glen Eira unlock the value in the deployed technology, our team supported Glen Eira to develop and implement multiple use cases for the smart lighting system, including the following.

  1. Constant Light Output (CLO) is a method by which the level of over lighting due to lumen depreciation of the LEDs over time is reduced. This is achieved by dimming the lights and reducing light output to the standards compliant level, and then increasing the power input to the luminaires over time to compensate for loss of lumen output. The results are substantial energy savings over the asset lifetime, and reduced levels of light pollution in the City’s neighbourhoods.
  2. Virtual Light Output (VLO) is a function by which the 100% output level of a luminaire can be redefined to a wattage lower than the rated wattage. This is useful to eliminate over lighting due to static luminaire ratings. For example, a 130W luminaire may be needed to comply with lighting levels, but the approved luminaires are 80W and 150W, so a 150W luminaire will be installed. This luminaire can then be converted to a 130W luminaires through a constant dim setting that runs in the background. This approach generates significant energy savings and reduces the undesirable effects of over lighting.

Constant Light Output is then still applied to these lights to increase savings further because lumen depreciation still occurs.

  1. A dynamic dimming strategy was developed together with specialist consultancy Ironbark for strategic locations in the deployment, whereby some roads are re-classified from a V3 to a V5 category during off peak times. This allows the street lights to be dimmed to lower lighting levels, while still complying with the applicable road lighting standard.
  2. Power outages of the luminaires are reported in real-time through a “last gasp” capability of the smart photocell devices. This feature and other forms of failure reporting are used to address issues with street lighting assets in a timely manner, before a member of the public reports a problem. This increases the lighting service to the community overall and improves road safety.

Power outage reporting has also been used to identify those assets which are still switched by obsolete PE cells on lighting poles, thereby helping to remove old legacy devices in the lighting network.

  1. The smart photocell devices have electricity metering capability with a high level of accuracy, and can report on real energy savings based on metered burning hours and the registered load table values of the conventional luminaires that were replaced with LEDs. This feature is used to assess the actual energy savings and compare them to the projections from the project’s business case.

SCS services

  • Working with the consultant, asset owner, and council to design a system that meets the customer’s needs, while at the same time meeting regulatory and utility-specific requirements.
  • Managing the supply, installation and commissioning of the system.
  • Overseeing the installation and then commissioning the system.
  • System trainings and inductions for the council and other stakeholders as required.
  • Advisory and implementation support for various smart lighting use cases.
  • 24/7 technical and operational support.

Key Customer Outcomes

  • Significant energy savings due to a combination of Constant Light Output, Virtual Light Output, and evidence-based, dynamic dimming strategies.
  • Real time failure and outage reporting to address issues in a timely manner, thereby increasing the quality of public lighting services to the community.
  • Regular and highly accurate energy reporting to validate consumption and to substantiate projected energy savings with real metering data.
  • Increased transparency of asset performance due to real-time monitoring capabilities of the system improves decision-making in asset management.