A look at Barcelona’s Smart Street Lights – video

In Barcelona's city center, 46 ,000 lighting points are managed by the French company Citi Loom and cabinets like this are critical to their operations. So this is what we call a normal or standard public lighting installation, okay? If we look at this, this is the electrical part, okay, a normal one would only take that, but this one is special. has a communication system to control all the public lighting that you can see around here. This area is known as Pasi de Gracia, a major avenue in Barcelona home to shopping and many businesses, so good lighting is key. Unlike in other parts of the city where street lights are controlled at the cabinet level, these lights have nodes that turn them on and off. So in each lighting fixture you have a device which communicates with this segment controller and it's It sends information to the cloud so the one who's working with the controls can manage to program lighting on, lighting off, dimming. Now Barcelona first unveiled its Lighting Master Plan in 2012 with the mission to retrofit all of its lights to LED in order to significantly reduce its energy consumption. However smart street light solutions were not deployed at large scale and today only about 5% of the lights managed by... C2 room which amounts to about 2 ,000 lights use a node like this and most of them are in the city center. You can see that we have like three sensors in this side other three on the other side I guess these three are connected with this one the other three are connected with the other cabinet and normally you have like two streets three streets connected by one or controlled by one cabinet. What were some of the biggest challenges? Well, the biggest challenge at the beginning for LED lighting was how to make the lights or the light go where you expected it to go. With the technology we had before, it was very easy and very robust. You made a project and you know always where the light was going to be. With LED, we had to do a lot of optical research in order to put the lights where it needs. Then electronics. At the beginning, working with electronics in the street is a little bit hard, so there has to be a lot of research and innovation on making these devices last in the street. But once you have evolved with that and that is solution, now the biggest challenge is the communication and how we will be able to transfer all the data that there will be in the future. without it being too expensive. Now, many of these problems stem from the fact that this technology first came to market in the early 2000s. It uses a power line communication system. That means data is transferred from the light to the cabinet through the electric grid. It's then sent to the cloud. That presents a limitation in terms of latency, bandwidth, and reliability. Newer technologies, typically like the one C2 Lumis deployed in Copenhagen, uses wireless communication. This is very centralized, I guess, in the future. everything will be in its lighting fixture. We will need this. We will need that to turn on the lights, but the communications with 5G, you don't need to have this segment controller. Here in Barcelona, C2Lum expects that 5G could reduce its dependence on the wires to transfer data and expand the capabilities of its electrical grid. We have every 10 meters a connection, electrical connection, which we can connect the 5G antenna. or whatever and it is very useful because we have like a very narrow and big grid electrical grid in the city that we can use and now it's only used by night to give light we should use it for other things and also during daylight because now there are possibilities of having tension 24 7 without the lights turning on so i think this is the high potential of the public lighting networks that we can use it as a big electrical network to connect all the sensors and to collect all the data that there are." Now when Barcelona first unveiled its smart streetlights, it really was considered ahead of its time. You see, streetlights do more than just illuminate a city, they're really the catalyst for other smart city projects and that was definitely true here in Barcelona. The city armed its lampposts with sensors that provided free wifi and allowed them to air quality and noise pollution, but eight years later, we've seen the city hasn't continued to invest in this technology and that's left other smart city projects to fall behind. But we want to hear from you. Be sure to send in your questions and comments with the link below. We'll then get your answers and put forward another story on this topic. Till then, I'm Diana Blass reporting for Current Insights.