Paris Continues Smart Street Light Ambitions Under Cielis

how long does it take to make every light in a city smart well in Paris it's 10 years and counting it underscores the complexities that come into play when technology and architecture converge especially when that architecture is steeped in history some view it as a challenge others an opportunity it's it's really Very exciting to be there to help make Paris even more beautiful. Juliette Antoine-Simon is the president of CELIS. In November of 2021, CELIS replaced Ivesa as the manager for Paris' public lighting and traffic light systems. A contract that will hold for the next 10 years at a value of roughly 704 million euros. Paris' largest public lighting contract today. Today, we'll visit CLS's headquarters to learn more about Paris' public lighting and what's to come. We have different sensors in Paris scattered around town. The city, one of them is here. Juliette is showing us the weather sensor system in Paris. This influences when the city's lights turn on and off. It's powered by 10 sensors spread across the city that communicate data on weather to a timer inside. the streetlight cabinets. It uses the Y Sun network established in 2016 by Silver Spring Networks now known as ITRON to do that. So the system we put in place allows to move by plus or minus 30 minutes the emission versus the standard sunrise time. So the objective was really to adapt the time the weather so no need to turn on the light if this is sunny weather in the summer so this needs to communicate with all the end device within two minutes at least twice a day tell us more about the ysun network that supports this system the rf network has been using 29 RF gateways, and we had the challenge to put it on public buildings of the city in order to connect it to the fiber network of the city. And this allows the city to be free of charge in terms of telecommunication. The weather system was among the the initial ways Paris achieved energy savings without converting to LED bulbs. But over the years, that's changed. Paris today is 30% lead. This has been made by the company that was before us, 30%. And we need to make 40 more percent lead. And interestingly, Paris is now even considering ways to use those LED lights to address concerns around biodiversity. A question, MediCity. have become interested in as of late how does the light pollution affect wildlife for example if we put a lower color temperature in in one place then we'll go and measure the number of animals or of trees before and then we come back maybe two years later and make another measurement and see whether this has been efficient or not that's some of the work sealers will have to tackle over the next 10 years The second and more daunting task will center upon making more of the street lights themselves smart. You see, when iTron first established the network, it connected all the cabinets with controllers, but very few lights are connected to the iTron network. Only when the lights are connected to that network can they communicate their data. We're also learning that Paris will stick with the cabinet controls and will not look to deploy individual controls on the lights. This would mean that. Paris can only operate and control the lights in clusters rather than view and manage each single light point. It's a slightly different business model from what we've seen in other large scale projects like Florida or Brussels. Energy savings will be slightly reduced with a cabinet control system, but the solution comes with a lower price tag and the city will still gain energy savings. Plus, the controls will be hidden, not impacting the historic charm of the city. So that's why... Lots of controllers are within cabinets, so these are not directly seen by anyone. And as we continued our tour of Cielsa's headquarters, we ended up here. So here you see the different screens. Workers are using a platform called Muse to keep an eye on the city. Muse is an asset management tool. It centralizes data generated. the city's equipment for analysis and maintenance. It can also present failures or issues reported by citizens. Those complaints are currently collected through Donsmaru, an application developed by the City of Paris. That information would have to be manually inserted into Muse. The same goes for the information on the lights collected through iTron Streetlight vision software. But moving forward, it's possible to streamline that process. connecting apps like iTron's Streetlight vision software directly to Muse for faster analysis. You can see all the assets on the map and have all the information in real time. The goal is to create a big picture view of the city's operations. It's another level, another layer of the software solution to allow... this decision -making for high level for the next few years for instance and the loyal layer is the managing of operations of maintenance of operations on the territory the both solutions work together at different levels now of course a big perk of the streetlight network, aside from operating the lights, includes smart city applications. And that's another reason to add even more streetlights to this network since a mesh network is only as strong as the number of light points connected to it. The stronger the network, the more availability for smart city use cases, some which have already seen the light of day. So we are currently collecting smart parking use cases. to gather parking data and to be able to smooth the parking flow. We also made a pilot to connect the traffic lights to the RF network in order to make the link between the traffic lights and the software which drives the traffic lights in Paris. So these are the two, let's say, smart city use cases that are up and running, to be widely deployed. So clearly, a lot more to come with Paris' Smart Streetlight project, and you can be sure we'll continue to follow them. And if there's one thing that we hope you learned in this video, clearly a Smart Streetlight project takes time. A lot. of time.