Stockholm Is Turning Its Street Lights Smart

Since 2012, Stockholm has been transforming its public lighting system. First came LED lights, then a maintenance software, and now the city is exploring the possibility of a city-wide lighting control system. Bjorn Lindelof weighs in on what a smart lighting system would look like for the capital of Sweden. The technology that we use for controlling the lighting is very old-fashioned. It's quite hard to sit there and sit there. central position at the transportation department and know what's happening on out on the field. With an intelligent lighting system Bjorn and his team can better monitor the 150 ,000 streetlights in Stockholm. They began this process eight years ago with the installation of LEDs. At the same time they future proof the luminaires by adding a control system. We change between six and eight thousand luminaires a year. So we want to prepare the luminaires. luminaires or actually add a control system straight away when actually up there in the lift. The push to install a citywide control system really kicked into high gear in 2017 when Stockholm adopted a new smart city strategy that prioritized lighting. Bjorn and his team then began a market analysis that dug into how other cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam carried out their projects. So we had quite a lot of discussion with other cities but also fairs or conferences and all the manufacturers show that they are producing luminaires with the SESAGA socket and we saw that as a good way to to future -proof our installation and in some cases we actually put some control system up there like Philips City Touch especially on bigger roads where is where we need to do night work or and have almost have to close the street to do The highest cost is not the material, it's the working hours and the maintenance cost. So even if we don't have a strategic decision to go for CityTouch solution, we put that up there anyways because that's what we already had that we knew about and it's easier for us to sort of integrate with that later on rather than go out again and adding something new. The city finished installing all- the luminaires in december 2019 and in march stockholm announced a deal with itron to deploy its streetlight vision platform the software delivers asset management analytics and control capabilities stockholm expects to have results from the project by the fall of 2020 bjorn estimates that the investment cost the city around two million dollars there's a lot of fixed costs that you do for doing because we did quite a big investigation before we started to implement something and that is something that we will have use for when building the whole city but now we're doing 180 luminaires so it's kind of a big overhead cost for for doing all the investigation and implementing new software and so this software could be used to control the whole city but now we only control 180 luminaires so in that scale it's being quite an expensive product I think the city joined the tall consortium and a push to ensure that it's not locked into a single vendor force technology It also joined the usify alliance that allowed it to access a standardized data model across its IoT networks. So in the edge we have the luminaire we supply that with the with the saga socket and then there's dali and d4i internally to communicate with some sort of control unit and on the other side we from from the cms side we decided to go with talk because that's what we found to be the most promising standard that we've seen on the market in the in the market analysis that sort of at least allows us to procure software and hardware independently and then we have the link as talk is built there's a talk gateway and that is necessary to have but there's no interoperability between the talk gateway and the node so we need to buy the node and the gateway from the same vendor as it is today but we see also there's a few initiatives on the market that we found quite recently that tries to find a way to standardize that last link as well and that so the hope is that we can have maybe two or three different talk gateways but we can buy the node from any vendor and then maybe there's some sort of variety on the market but at least everyone can connect to one of those three or five or whatever we have gateways now there are some smaller lighting projects underway in Stockholm where the city has been able to track the benefits of smart lighting technology under the EU funded grow smarter project the city of Arsta installed sensor controlled LED lights for pedestrian and bike paths that included a preset lighting schedule and remote controlled LED streetlights the demand controlled lighting levels resulted in reduced electricity costs of about 40 to 50 percent. However, some red tape remains in Stockholm when it comes to capitalizing on the next phase of innovation in which cameras or antennas for 5G are placed on lampposts. As the regulation goes in Sweden, we build our own power network for the lighting and that's sort of, what do you call it, it's not really how we can do it because it's the power company that has to... of us in Monolopy to sell power and build the power network, the power grid. But we're allowed to build the power grid ourselves specifically for lighting. But then we only have the right to do it for lighting and then we can only use the power for lighting. But if we put up cameras, that's not lighting. If we put up 5G, that's not lighting. But I know the government is looking at changing the rules for how to build, sort of, the power. grid in Sweden in general and what the regulation should be like to not stand in the way of innovation and technological technological development now this all comes as Stockholm pushes towards its goal becoming the smartest city in the world from 2040 but we want to hear from you be sure to send us your questions with the link below we'll do our best to get your answers till next time I'm Diana Blass reporting for current insights