Stakeholders, among them, energy solutions providers, cities, utilities and academics alike, have been looking at solutions around smart street lights. For cities, the main motivator is the potential to realize as much as 70% savings on their street lighting energy bills. When you consider some of these cities are spending a quarter of their annual energy budget on street lights you can see why there is an added impetus on their part for the benefit of their rates payers to find a solution sooner.
In the Municipality of Houten in the Netherlands, Landis+Gyr worked with long term customer Stedin who were facing the need to update their street light technology. Landis+Gyr’s S650 Smart Grid Terminal was used as a complete solution for the street lights. This solution provided among many benefits:
Real measurement of consumption
Optimized switching and dimming of the street lights
Reduction in CO2 emissions generally caused by public street lighting
However, smarter streetlights are just one piece in the puzzle of creating a more energy efficient world. Distributed generation, electric vehicles and demand response will be in the focus of the smart grid and the utilities leading the way are taking important steps in preparing their network for the future challenges (read more in our latest issue of pathway).
For Stedin, a need was identified to also improve their operations and energy efficiency by taking steps towards creating a smarter grid and realizing the vision of a “self-healing grid”. Among other benefits, the Landis+Gyr S650 Smart Grid Terminal solution could be used for distribution transformer monitoring. This would ultimately improve awareness of the distribution network status and optimize operations and maintenance of the network. By installing S650 Smart Grid Terminals, the networks are also prepared for the distributed energy supply of the future.