Smart City Expo World Congress Barcelona 2025

Miguel Sangalang, welcome to the Kurrant studio at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona. Mr. Sangalang is the Executive Director and General Manager of the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting, who is overseeing lighting while reshaping the way utilities support smart city projects. So, Miguel, the first question is LA Street Lighting Network is it's one of the largest in the world. How are you transforming it from a utility asset into a smart city project platform? Thanks for the question, and thanks for having me here, Emma, as well. I appreciate the conversation. I want to talk a little bit about the history because, now, street lights are predominantly in the background. They've been in your neighborhood for a very long time. In Los Angeles, someone probably uses it as safe base for tag or hide and seek or other things. But the origins is one of innovation. I mean, this was 100 years ago. We were formed 100 years ago when the light bulb first came out. And we, a small pueblo, Los Angeles, then maybe 50,000 people looked at New York, the largest city in America, and said, wow, we really need that for our community too. And so we took the most dangerous thing at the time, electricity, the most innovative thing at the time, the light bulb and put it where people are. So our origin is kind of the innovation, the things that we want to have in our communities. Now fast forward a hundred years now, and we're at that same point again, because what we've built in Los Angeles, where we have a quarter of a million street lights, 9000 miles, I forget how to translate that into kilometers, but 9000 miles, 27,000 miles of, I'm sorry, 9000 miles of conduit, 27,000 miles of copper wire that have connected the entire city. That's the penultimate network electrical network, right? And it's in the places where we actually need to get, better information or right of way. We have to manage more as a city. So it's in the perfect place for us to start thinking about how to make this first one use thing, which was very transformative. Right? The light bulb and how it changed the character of neighborhood was transformative. It did its job. But single use assets are very expensive. Right. And so how do you actually make it so that they could do multiple uses for the investment that we've done over time. Okay. And what's the vision behind using street lights as a digital infrastructure for connectivity, sensors and other services? What's the goal? There's what I'd say is it has a lot of the ingredients for the right recipe already. One as I mentioned, it's in the very valuable public right of way. This is where people congregate. This is where conveyance happens, right? And so the positioning alone is highly valued. Two we have invested in an electrical system that now then can be used for multiple things. It's the base right. It's the utility. And so having that area that you are able to own and manage having it powered, and now some of the things that we're doing is actually in parallel of the electrical system building a fiber conduit network, so that we would have both the penultimate electrical and communications network. Some of the things that you need for modern technology today. And so with that, it just unlocks multiple ways that you can use it. Some that I don't even think we know how to use it or maximize it even today. Okay. And how do you prioritize, I mean there's so many potential projects, so many potential ways of using the street lighting from public safety to energy savings to data collection. How do you prioritize the projects? So the one thing I will say is that in L.A., we're pretty well known for experimenting, especially in our bureau. I have a saying where we'll try anything three times. The first time you might have sent me a product that doesn't work. The second time I might have configured it wrong the third time, okay, maybe it doesn't work out for the purposes, right? So we're always trying to test and and see what works for us. Just because we see that technology's changing faster than ever before. So we're actually going to have to just try and test at a faster clip than governments I think are used to now. I think that, for us, too, we're trying to make sure that it's just part of our normal operation. So I know you're trying to say, how do you prioritize? But what I'd counter with is if you have 100% of your time, you should be spending 10 or 20% of your time just testing and trying new things. Otherwise, how will you actually learn how to affect the other 80% of your operations? Right. So we're trying to build that into the culture. And yes, there are things that we're looking at like return on investment. So Los Angeles was one of the first cities in the world to adopt LED street lights about 15 years ago. And that was a major deployment. It helped drive down our costs by about $10 million annually, and cut our power bill by a little bit more than a third, I mean, for our power bill. And so that was almost a no brainer where we took a new technology and said, the ROI is right there. We tested it for a couple communities. Then we expanded it to the entire network. But that needed a space where you were just intentional about trying new things. Otherwise you will never, ever realize those larger gains in the future. And I think that's something that we're looking at for multiple technologies now. I mean, we're expanding our smart node network. So we'd be able to tell if there are outages or cases of theft and vandalism or if there are infrastructure issues where, God forbid, a car hits a pole and it's leaning over there. That's a dangerous condition, right? We would want to be informed about that sooner rather than later. So all those things, when we're thinking about the public safety aspect, those are very, very valuable pieces for us to deploy. And you've piloted EV charging through street lighting poles. What have you learned from that deployment? And also I'm asking this question because what is the resident response been like? For example, when I talked to users of chargers on street lights, the one that loved it, he said it was a great idea. And then I asked another user and they said it takes seven hours to charge 50%. So what would you say to that? Well, I think that there's going to be different tools for different jobs, and that's going to be the case for EV chargers too. And I totally understand when someone says, man, I need to get that charge, I need to go. And now with the different versions of chargers that we have, we have higher level, level two charging in California. That's what we actually do. Which, yes, it would take a few hours if you're trying to fill up your fully electric vehicle. But we're looking into DC fast charging level three chargers as well, that will juice you up 80% in 20 minutes or so. So there's other technologies that we're looking to bring to bear. There's going to be, I think, important form factor issues that we’ll have to deal with. These are going to require larger transformers. These are going to require larger pieces of infrastructure for us to do. But that's one of the challenges that I think that cities and, government agencies are going to have to face while we're doing this electric transition. We're going to have to consider how all these technologies actually fit in the built environment. So basically on the street lights, it's like an added. Yes. The idea is to have other infrastructure and then just have that added to it. Yes, yes. And, I'll give a couple examples why. So I mentioned before that we converted our entire street lighting system to LED that actually dropped our power consumption. So this is one of the reasons why we're able to do EV chargers. We have extra capacity. Then the electrical system was actually built out and already there. So we have this thing where it actually is far cheaper for us. Instead of having to break ground and break concrete, it's an attachment to low cost. I build chargers at a rate of one charger a day. If I had the funding for it, I can go to almost a quarter of a million. Right? Chargers in the city of Los Angeles. And that's given to us by the opportunity of having that infrastructure that's already there that we built out, which is the streetlight. And how do you collaborate with private partners and utilities while keeping public value and data control in mind? Yeah, that's a complicated question. And I'll answer it in, I'll say 2 or 3 parts. One, we, as I mentioned, we're always looking for ways to pilot things. And so we've worked with entities like marketplace.city that are trying to get kind of marketplace information for us to show that, hey, these are some of the companies that are doing this technology. We obviously come to events like this and the Smart City Expo World Congress, where you have the entire kind of industry coming together to show you, these are the things that we have. And then there's, other components as well, where obviously there's cold calls and other things where people approach us and try and do it, and we're trying to filter all throughout all that. I have a dedicated smart cities division that just constantly does and tests new technology for us to deploy. The pilots themselves, they tend to be small and things that we are then able to just either do low cost, the city of Los Angeles has an innovation fund that is off budget cycle. So you ask when you need it and you're able to actually put money towards it. And so one of the things that we actually are doing is we use the Innovation Fund to purchase a 3D printer, and that's going to actually lower our materials costs and bring a lot of in-house production for the things that we use and plasma cutters that we've purchased that have reduced my materials from, a simple base door that I've had to buy in the past at $125, I produce in-house for 5 to 10. So all of these things then that we're looking at, across the board. When it comes to testing it out, then dealing with the issues around privacy, around data, that is a place where we're trying to be very conscious, I mean, of what it's going to be used for. And, I think that's a place where we try and preserve ownership of much of the data that we have. It is then the city of Los Angeles’ data and should be used only for the purpose of the city of Los Angeles. Because we're still trying to work throughout all the kinks that are happening there in the privacy realm. I think longer term, that's also where we've had to have a lot of legal guidance then in order for us to kind of approach those different types of technology as well. And you mentioned AI. So how do you envision AI predictive maintenance or automation changing your operations, the way you work, like your day to day in maybe the next decade? Let's say let's give it time. Okay. Well, I'm glad you said the next decade. Yeah. I'll say a little bit of what's happening now too, though, because for us it was interesting. I mentioned 3D printers earlier. And I have electricians for Los Angeles where Google Suites city. And so we have Gemini kind of embedded into the enterprise software that we use. And I actually have electricians. These are the people that are rough knuckled, out there digging holes, setting poles, for the bureau and wiring the city up, that are blue collar workers that have actually used AI to help them with the startup and the production of our 3D printer. So everything that they've needed to just get that up and running, they've used AI for all the procedures, written manuals, some of the experimentation with the different substrates of materials that we're using, it's fantastic for them. And these are people where most of the consideration, I think, has been in a back office use, administrative data for AI, but these are field people that are using it on a daily basis now in our yard. And I think that that will continue to be transformative because with additional training, our office staff and the rest of them are also getting used to those tools. And being able to produce more at a faster rate. In the future, if I were to think blue skies, there are things that are going to help us drive down our total cost of ownership. When you think about preventative maintenance, when you think about, perhaps weather patterns or neighborhood conditions that might wear down poles at a faster rate than we might have expected. You know, these are engineered to last 50 to 70 years, but something could have made it so that it can only last 40. And what if those conditions, how can we actually put it into models that will show us? That's going to be important when we're talking about infrastructure that is really heavy. It's 500 to 1,000 pounds. And that's a dangerous object where if it degrades, it can create and pose significant risk and liability. But the other thing, I can't wait till we figure out, and again, this is blue skies, as I'm not saying we're trying to to go into it, but let's play the what if game. What if we can actually then see if we can use drones with AI to try and replace some of the smart nodes when they go out and prevent us from using, two man bucket trucks, which is going to be the most expensive deployment for us. Yeah, right. Because you have to bring it up, bring it down, up. You have to bring it down, then you have to move it and you have to do it again. Yeah. And we're able to use some of these technologies with just a couple field workers that are monitoring the entire situation to do things that are of relative repetition. And not something that would require heavy troubleshooting and thinking. Now, if the system goes down, that's a different thing. We're going to need those people there. But even still drones inspection and trying to see what's going on, it can aid in the assessment of what is wrong with our systems. Yeah. And then my last question is, if you could change the way cities approach utilities, what would you change? I think it's really clear and understood the discipline of urban planning, of transportation planning, sustainability, resiliency. Like there's there's a lot of considerations that have gone in there. I think for utilities, the challenge is trying to make sure that it is injected into these other disciplines. I would almost venture to say there's a whole nother discipline that has to be there. And that's I'll just say digital urban planning, because all of these things that we're talking about, all of these technologies, and there's a lot that's intangible, the data and the information, but ultimately we're talking about sensors, we're talking about fiber, we're talking electricity, we're talking about things that are actually physical, that need to exist somewhere. I often joke with people that the cloud just means someone else's computer in a different place. So you're still using that. The internet people think that it's just on your phone and it goes throughout the air, well it lands somewhere, and that usually is an antenna that goes to then a piece of fiber that's on a pole or underground. Right. So all of these components exist. And the concept of making sure that that's part of their I'm not saying that we're, we're trying to be smart for just smart sake and trying to deploy as much technology. But there has to be a level of I'll coin another term right now, like plug and play right of way, where you're going to have to be able to say, oh, this is the component we need. We'll use this when ‘oh we don't need it anymore. Pull it out, plug in another thing’, because you have some of the basics that are there. And so and this is the this is the value then of using existing infrastructure like street lights, which are the places where you can plug and play things. And thinking about that as part of then, that future digital urban planning that we have to do that supports the higher level goals that we want, which is still sustainability, which is still resiliency, right? Which is still equity, which is Vision Zero, all these things, but it runs on something. Okay. Well, thank you so much for this conversation. It was very interesting. And thank you for bringing the city pride. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And thank you all for watching.