Warsaw’s Zarząd Dróg Miejskich (ZDM), the city’s municipal roads authority, has selected Emitel as the winning bidder to design, build and operate an intelligent street lighting control system covering more than 110,000 luminaires. The base contract is worth nearly PLN 79 million (about €18.4 million), runs for eight years with an option to extend by another five, and follows a second, revised tender after ZDM’s first attempt was cancelled in 2024 over pricing. Installation of remote controllers is expected to take roughly two years, with the goal of cutting the city’s street lighting electricity use by up to 30 percent annually.
A Second Tender After A Failed First Attempt
ZDM first opened this procurement in July 2024, drawing four bids ranging from PLN 44.4 million to PLN 171.4 million, including proposals from a consortium of Orange Polska and Schréder Polska, a Lithuanian consortium of Lucidus Techno and Lucidus SIA, Emitel, and Pollight. That round was scrapped after two offers were rejected on formal grounds and the remaining bids exceeded the authority’s budget. ZDM relaunched the tender in April 2025, and this time Emitel’s revised bid of roughly PLN 105 million gross came in below competing offers from a reconstituted Orange Polska, Schréder Polska and Lumiqon consortium, Pollight, and Deloitte Consulting. The final signed base contract value, according to Emitel, is nearly PLN 79 million.
What The Contract Covers
Under the agreement, Emitel will supply intelligent controllers for installation on Warsaw’s streetlights, build a cloud-based infrastructure management platform, and construct a Lighting Management Center equipped with operator workstations and a video wall for real-time monitoring. A separate contractor, to be selected by the city through another tender, will handle physical installation of the controllers. Emitel’s vice president Jarosław Helman has described the project’s scale as encompassing roughly 120,000 remotely controlled lamps and around 2,000 controllers feeding into a single operations room for ZDM staff.
From Manual Switching To Remote, Weather-Responsive Control
Warsaw’s lighting is currently switched on and off by independent controllers installed in more than 2,200 lighting cabinets across the city, with timing programmed around sunrise and sunset and no remote adjustment possible. The new system will let ZDM change activation times daily based on conditions such as cloud cover, and dial down luminaire output on well-lit streets or during low-traffic overnight hours. Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski said the control center would let the city adapt lighting to natural light levels and seasonal patterns, calling such tools increasingly necessary given climate-driven heat waves and water shortages affecting European cities.
Fault Detection Built Into The Hardware
Beyond dimming and scheduling, the controllers are designed to continuously report luminaire operating parameters back to the management center, triggering automatic alerts to maintenance crews when a fault occurs. ZDM expects this to allow diagnosis of many problems remotely, without a technician needing to open the fixture or travel to the site, which the authority says should lower maintenance costs and shorten outage times. ZDM director Łukasz Puchalski said the agency expects to be able to manage lighting intensity remotely within about a year, reducing output as the night progresses and public expectations around excess illumination shift.
Building On A Five-Year Fixture Replacement Program
The control system tender follows a separate, multi-year program in which Warsaw replaced its street lighting fixtures with energy-efficient SAVA-branded LED units, a rollout ZDM describes as the largest of its kind in Poland. As of 2024, ZDM figures put installed SAVA fixtures at roughly 64,600 out of a citywide inventory of about 122,000 lighting fixtures, with total LED fixtures exceeding 87,000. According to Emitel’s contract announcement, the city has invested PLN 65 million in fixture replacement to date, generating annual savings of about PLN 60 million and cumulative savings approaching PLN 150 million, funds the authority says are continuously reinvested into further modernization.
Vendor Background And Prior Smart City Work In Poland
Emitel is Poland’s largest terrestrial radio and television broadcast infrastructure operator, majority owned by UK-based Cordiant Digital Infrastructure since a 2022 acquisition, and has expanded into IoT and smart city services alongside its core broadcasting business. The company’s most cited reference project is a remote water-meter reading system built for Wrocław’s Miejskie Przedsiębiorstwo Wodociągów i Kanalizacji using LoRaWAN network technology, which began in 2021 covering roughly 70,000 meters and was expanded in 2024 with modules for 25,000 additional meters. Emitel has also cited smaller municipal IoT deployments in Poland covering parking-space monitoring, noise-level sensors, and drainage water-level sensors in Piaseczono.
Market Context
The Warsaw contract lands as European cities continue converting street lighting from a purely operational cost center into a networked sensing and connectivity layer, a trend tracked closely by smart city and street lighting technology press. ZDM has signaled that future phases could extend the lighting infrastructure toward charging points for shared bikes and scooters, or even use always-on power at lighting poles to support passenger information systems on buses and trams, though none of that is included in the current contract scope.
