in Barcelona
3 to 5 Nov 2026
The municipality of Covilhã in central Portugal, home to 46,606 residents according to the 2024 estimate of Statistics Portugal, has contracted a 16-year energy-efficiency programme worth about €19 million including VAT to replace its public lighting with 19,533 connected LED luminaires, with the project details reported on 29 October 2026 from a press statement. The companies expect energy consumption for public lighting to fall by about 80 percent, total savings of about €1.72 million over the contract term and avoided emissions of about 30,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, all of which are estimates supplied by the contractors and not audited results.
ARQUILED, a smart-lighting company within the Visabeira Group, is responsible for the technology component, and Amener is responsible for the overall execution of the contract signed with the municipality.
Contract Structure And What The €19 Million Covers
The package goes beyond luminaire replacement, because it combines the LED hardware, a central management platform called ECCOS City, a LoRaWAN communications layer and photovoltaic self-consumption units, known in Portugal as UPAC, on municipal buildings, all inside a single energy-efficiency management contract that runs for 16 years. Dividing the contract value by the number of luminaires gives about €973 per light point including VAT, although that figure also carries the platform, the self-consumption units and the long-term management scope, so it is not a unit price for the fixture.
The estimated savings of €1.72 million are made up of about €1.60 million from the lighting modernisation and about €120,000 from electricity produced by the UPAC installations. Spread across 16 years, the lighting component equals about €100,000 a year, and the combined savings equal about 9 percent of the contract value.
Network Architecture: LoRaWAN Modules On Each Luminaire
Communications run on LoRaWAN, with modules installed in the luminaires so that each of the 19,533 light points can be addressed individually. According to the companies, the ECCOS City platform lets operators adjust light levels by zone and time of day, follow energy consumption, detect faults and manage each luminaire remotely, and most of the fixtures are ARQUILED products, which keeps the hardware and the control software within the same corporate group.
Per-point reporting is what allows the 80 percent reduction estimate to be checked against metered consumption, because the saving combines the lower wattage of LED sources with the dimming levels that the platform sets by zone and time of day.
Miguel Allen Lima, chief executive of ARQUILED, said in the announcement that the project shows how LED lighting, Internet of Things communications and digital urban management platforms can reduce consumption, emissions and operating costs for municipalities, which is the case the 19,533-point deployment will now be asked to demonstrate in metered data.
A Comparison With ARQUILED’s Coimbra Project
The same contractor group completed a larger conversion in Coimbra, which Visabeira Group reported in September 2025 as 23,027 conventional light points converted to LED, more than half of them smart and monitored. The group put ARQUILED’s equipment and services in that project at €7 million, and it cited a total energy saving of 74.25 percent, about 9.7 gigawatt-hours a year and more than 3,500 tonnes of carbon dioxide avoided annually, again as company figures.
In Coimbra the investment is funded from the savings by the energy services company PreZero Portugal. The Covilhã structure is described as an energy-efficiency management contract of 16 years, and the reported contract value of €19 million is higher than the Coimbra equipment figure because it also includes the execution scope handled by Amener, the self-consumption units and the contract term, so the two numbers are not directly comparable.
The Coimbra reference gives a planning benchmark for Covilhã: the 74.25 percent saving claimed there sits below the 80 percent estimated for Covilhã, and the difference will depend on the efficiency of the luminaires being replaced, the share of fixtures that are dimmed and the hours of operation set by the municipality.
Market Context For Connected Street Lighting In Portugal
Covilhã covers about 555 square kilometres at a density of 83.9 inhabitants per square kilometre according to the Statistics Portugal profile, so 19,533 light points are spread across a territory of low density, and a wireless LoRaWAN layer that reaches each luminaire without dedicated cabling suits that geography.
For vendors, the contract follows the pattern seen in Coimbra of pairing ARQUILED luminaires with the ECCOS City management platform, a combination that determines how easily a municipality can add third-party equipment during a 16-year term. On 29 October 2026 the TALQ Consortium released Edition 5 of its free Tender Template for smart outdoor lighting, which summarises requirements in five profiles covering lighting, cabinet control, asset management and two DALI D4i luminaire and sensor profiles, and which is written for buyers that want interoperable equipment from multiple vendors.
What The Next Phase Of The Project Will Measure
The metrics that will decide whether the estimates are met are the energy consumption per light point against the pre-project baseline, the proportion of the 19,533 luminaires reporting to ECCOS City through LoRaWAN, and the electricity output of the UPAC units that supply the remaining €120,000 of the €1.72 million projected savings. Because the programme runs for 16 years and the €1.72 million is a cumulative estimate, the first full year of metered data after commissioning will provide the first test of the 80 percent estimate against the roughly €100,000 a year that the lighting component must deliver.
