Philips LED Lighting Hits The Streets In Los Angeles
At the recent panel discussion at 2016 CES called Beyond Smart Cities: The Future of Urban Mobility (video), panelists discussed what a shame it would be if we went around cities replacing dumb incandescent street lights with dumb LED street lights. The angle on this replacement opportunity is that technology exists that can dramatically improve both the way we light our cities and enable our street lights to work for us in completely new ways.
Philips has not only mastered LED solutions for the home but is also bringing high quality LED tech to the streets – literally – and the new solutions are compelling. Retrofitting current street lights with LEDs is a very clear opportunity for energy usage reductions and the savings that come along for the ride, but Philips was not content at just bringing in new and improved lighting.
The Philips City Touch initiative is an example of Philips taking a core competency in lighting solutions…stepping back and dreaming up a blue sky solution of what an ideal lighting solution would look light at the city scale. City Touch adds communications and intelligence to LED street lighting solutions. Each lighting fixture includes smart logic that monitors the status of the light fixture, enables on the fly adjustments, maintenance status communications, and energy usage monitoring.
The City Touch solution allows lighting system managers to remotely program and control lighting across a city at the touch of a button or the click of a mouse using the City Touch application. What’s exciting about this tech is that it can be funded by the projected savings coming from improved energy efficiency, and it brings more than the original lighting did to the table.
Lighting can be programmed using the City Touch application which enables:
- Seasonal tuning of lighting down to a daily level of detail
- Automated fault detection that can trigger maintenance requests
- Lights can be managed at the individual level or grouped together in whatever group size best fits the need
- Light levels can be managed
- Customized lighting delivers improved safety where cities need it the most
- Lighting schedules can be assigned for individual lights, groups of lights or full regions of a city, depending on the need.
- Detailed power consumption monitoring
Los Angeles was the first city in North America to implement the City Touch solution, and with 215,000 street lights in the city with more than 400 different styles in use, keeping the lights on around town was no small task. Prior to implementing City Touch, maintenance consisted of crews that drove around the streets at night to find bulbs requiring attention – not the most sophisticated or efficient plan, and with over 40,000 maintenance calls per year for street lights, it was not meeting the need.
City Touch delivered a modern solution that not only improves the longevity of the lighting at a reduced operating cost, it also comes with built-in outage alerts which takes the burden off of manual monitoring teams and shifts the load to a central team. This allows for lower maintenance costs, more proactive monitoring, faster response times and fewer outages – wins all around.
Find the Philips press release here and check out an overview of the Los Angeles lighting story below:
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