Smart Street Lighting NY Connected 178K LEDs So Far

in 2018 New York kick -started a statewide smart streetlight project with the goal to convert 500 ,000 streetlights to LEDs it came with big promises expected saving of 87 million dollars annually for tax payers the project is now halfway completed with 280 7 ,000 streetlights converted to LEDs and at least 58 ,000 of those lights equipped with connected photocell. The New York Power Authority, also known as NEPA, is an organization that's working with cities, towns, villages, and counties across the state to manage and implement the transition to LED streetlight technology. What kind of started all this was back in 2015, New York State passed legislation that required utilities to provide a sale price for local governments to purchase their street lighting system. So that really gave an avenue for communities to, you know, purchase this street lighting equipment that they normally would just, you know, pay to the utilities to maintain and pay for energy usage. Then in 2018, Governor Cuomo announced Smart Street Lighting New York, which is a state initiative to convert 500,000 streetlights to LED by 2025. As part of that initiative, NYPA was tasked to lead that effort and we developed a full turnkey service that really helps communities with the acquisition, conversion, design, construction management, and financing of these projects. Now, the 500 ,000 streetlight goal really includes all streetlights, so communities can choose to either go through a utility conversion, where the utilities continue to own and operate the streetlighting system, or they can choose to purchase and convert the streetlights themselves. The project aims to give more power to the communities. Ideally, communities want to own and operate their infrastructure. But as NIPA's Kevin Lutheran tells us, it's not always easy. Communities really are weighing that option, whether they want to take on that responsibility of now having to maintain the street lighting system, because that's a huge pinpoint for municipalities to have to develop a street light maintenance service. You need linemen to perform the work. so we actually built a maintenance service that can bolt on to our conversion process so far new york has converted 287 000 street lights to led and roughly 71 000 of those lights were installed by nypa and of those 71 000 lights 58 000 are equipped with connected photo cells nypa is currently constructing and designing another 120 000 street lights and say all of have opted for asset control nodes and what we're installing are the network lighting controllers so essentially these control nodes are installed on the nema sockets of the street lighting equipment and they can communicate through different protocols whether it's lte or an rf mesh network and that gives a lot of insight into the performance of the street lighting system so our whole maintenance program is based on these network lighting controllers and it's a requirement to participate in nypa's maintenance service where we have a complete digital automated system where we can monitor the streetlights on behalf of the municipalities develop work orders and help deploy contractors to create those repairs and then one of the other benefits with the controllers is the ability to dim your street lights so you can actually dim different areas or regions although there's no tariff in place now to collect and develop those dimming savings we're working with utilities and the public service commission through rate case is to try to develop a dimming tariff so that in the future if you dim your street lights you're essentially saving money naipa also went out and made a nationwide bid directly to street lighting manufacturer to try and get the most cost -effective solution for street light materials we got several bids back and one of the the most competitively priced product that we received is signifies street lighting material so we've been using a lot of signifies lighting equipment Really, NYPA is vendor agnostic. So we work with other companies to deploy their technology, such as SimCon, who also has a solution. And really, it depends on the application of the equipment in the region. We have deployed a lot of Interact City, which is Signify's software platform, as well as like, you know, SimCon. But ultimately, the communities own the data in the dashboard and everything. NYPA gets access to view it so that we can help monitor with the streetlight. maintenance and everything when it comes to the project cost the street lighting system usually amount to about 40 percent of the total cost naipa ensures that utilities are selling the smart lighting system at a fair price by developing a common methodology to evaluate the street light sale price this eliminates all negotiations with the sale of a street light naipa also offers to finance the project on behalf of the communities we can bundle all the costs up front um and then offer our long-term financing option where they don't spend any money until the project's 100% complete. Others choose the bond for the project and will pay for it outright along the way. Beyond smart street lighting, Naipa is working today with communities to develop other type of smart city projects. The reason why the LED street light conversion in smart cities kind of go hand in hand is the large energy in facility savings you can develop from the street light conversion. can help fund and offset the higher cost for smart city deployment syracuse in upstate new york is among the cities benefiting from that the city converted 17 300 street lights to leds that are now providing the connectivity for a range of smart city applications so with connect connectivity they installed public wi -fi in some general parks in different areas like that as well as community centers as far as the environmental sensors they installed no detection devices and it actually provides like predictive analytics so you know when the ice will form based on outside conditions to deploy your salt trucks as efficiently as possible. Another environmental sensor deployed in Syracuse is flood detection so you know they're able to monitor different areas around bridges or low -lying land where you know that tends to flood that information will be captured in real time and then Syracuse can reach out to the community. in that area and notify them. And then one of the other items they installed is different public safety efforts. Those public safety efforts included the implementation of sensors to monitor vacant homes and potential fires. Altogether, this was a $16 million project that's come to save Syracuse over $3 million annually by cutting the cost of energy and maintenance and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Naipa says the city is a prime example of what it hopes to achieve statewide as it pushes ahead with its Smart Street Lighting New York program. For more coverage on this project unfolds stay with current insights and if you have a question or a comment on the story hit the button below.