Smart Streetlights Controls Installed in Innovation Districts

October 9, 2020 - Brooks City Base

By Valeria Torrealba- Staff Intern, San Antonio Sentinel

The City of San Antonio is partnering up with CPS Energy to conduct a Smart Streetlight project that will aim to cut back on utility costs across the city. The smart streetlights, installed on Sept. 23, will run their pilot phase for six months. The trial is scheduled to end during March 2021. 

Installed within the Brooks Innovation Zone, the city partnered with Itron in order to implement up to 45 streetlights that will aid in the collection of data regarding flooding, parking and air quality. 

Itron, an innovative company with a mission to implement more sustainable energy sources across the globe, has partnered with CPS in order to implement a series of streetlights under the canopy of a network that would allow for more control and regulation across the City of San Antonio.

“There’s two parties involved here,” said Senior Director of Product Management Dan Evans. “CPS has always been a longtime customer of Itron’s, deploying our smart metering solutions for their gas and the electric, and smart grid infrastructure. We did a smart lighting pilot with CPS a few years ago, but last year the city partnered with CPS to construct a Smart Cities pilot.”

The pilot phase referenced by Evans refers to SmartCities, an effort that allows for urban areas, such as San Antonio, to both improve the quality of life and improve efficiencies city-wide. The pilot phase being tested within the innovation zones across San Antonio would gauge for flooding, air quality and parking. 

“The fundamental infrastructure that we put in place starts with the streetlights themselves,” said Evans. “As infrastructure goes, those locations are ideal for adding technology, because they typically are powered 24/7 and you can add things to it.”

With technology continuously advancing and the threat of climate change becoming a more daunting one across the globe, metropolitan areas have shifted their focus into renewable energy sources -- such as switching from high pressure sodium to LED powered lights. 

“The other thing that is a phenomenon that has been going on for the last couple of years is a lot of cities have started a conversion of their streetlights from older technology [high pressure sodium] to the newer [LED] technology that many of us have in our homes today, because the price point has come down so low,” said Evans. “So, as a part of those projects of cities going out and upgrading to LED, which is what San Antonio is looking into doing, adding the “controls” aspect to the light at the same time that the crews are going out and changing the light fixtures themselves is really a phenomenon.”

San Antonio could largely benefit from the savings that the smart streetlights would bring. Traditionally, maintenance crews can be seen working on broken streetlights. The services that Itron would provide, however, would make it easier for the streetlights to be repaired. Essentially, the middle man -- the citizen reporting the failure or outage -- would be eliminated. 

“There’s a couple of key benefits that the customer gets from that,” said Evans. “It becomes the virtual citizen. So, in most countries and cities around the world, the person who’s responsible for maintaining the streetlights finds out that they have a failure, but, a customer or a citizen will call in, typically. Well, these technologies --- the controllers that go up on the lights -- are actually performing that function, they’ll alert immediately upon a failure. They’ll get indicators of failures that soon occur, they give a lot of data that the customer and the city can use to measure energy consumption and things like that. That’s the main benefit.”

The streetlights would operate under a network constantly monitoring the data received from the software installed within the lights. This would allow for maintenance crews to be fully informed on a failure in the system beforehand, ultimately allowing them to address it and quickly repair it.

“The second benefit is a lot of the information about the light is provided as part of the software that’s used in the solution,” said Evans. “So, the maintenance crews are going out with all of the right equipment and right to the exact location where the problem is, because the controller has told them where it is.This prevents multiple truck rolls when the citizen has not had the right information, which [prevents] additional costs the city has to make. What Itron has done is parlayed that into some additional SmartCities, which have become more interesting and popular.” 

In San Antonio, the Smart StreetLights project would serve as a pilot phase to test out the gauging of water levels and air quality done by the sensors. By installing the streetlights, the software makes data accessible at any point where a sensor is located, which would allow for more data on flooding and air quality drops to be accessible. 

“Anywhere under those streetlights now, I can get connectivity for those sensors,” said Evans. “One is water level flood detection. Around the city, they wanted to get early indicators that [due to rains or other events] they are seeing higher levels of water and be able to dispatch crews [in order to] put up signs, keep the public away from those areas that might be flooded or about to flood, so that is one of the applications we will be deploying as part of the pilot.” 

Ambient noise measurement would also be tested as part of the initial pilot phase. 

“[The second one is] ambient noise measurement,” said Evans. “So, really understanding in other areas of the city and entertainment districts, what is the noise level that is out there. If certain bars or restaurants are starting to exceed that noise level, they [the streetlights] can actually capture that data so they can dispatch people to see if that’s climbing.”

Another aspect of the pilot phase would be testing out smart parking. This would facilitate parking issues for residents, especially around the downtown area, where parking and traffic can get congested quickly. 

“This is essentially sensors that are trained on parking spots, in this case along Market Street,” said Evans. “The parking spots around there will be monitored and this would allow the city and the citizen to see if a space is occupied or available. The goal here, if you think about expansion beyond one street, would be [that] this information could be presented to the drivers as they’re driving into the downtown area or presented in an application. It prevents them from circling the block, looking for a parking spot on the street.”

Relating to the air quality aspect phase, the streetlights would include sensors able to determine the air quality of its area in a more detailed manner.

“We’re looking for temperature information around heat islands,” said Evans. “Temperature has gotten too high due to heat off of the pavement -- it’s more of a public safety aspect. You get much more granular information by deploying these sensors around the city, as opposed to relying to the EPA for information [on air quality].”

Itron, partnered with CPS and the City of San Antonio, aims to provide renewable energy sources for cities, as well as an aide to maintain the city green. 

“We have to remember that at the end of the day, the technology is here to serve the City of San Antonio,” Itron representative Itai Dadon said during an interview. 

“It is extremely important for us to be able to articulate it very clearly. In order to help citizens understand what we do, we break down for our citizens what the technology does in three domains,”  said Dadon. “The first one is the social impact: the domain that is about quality of life and product safety, and public health. Different technologies have different impacts on that dimension. The second is the environmental [impact]: how do we get the community to be more self-sustainable and see the impact on the environment? And the third dimension is the economic dimension. We help cities improve their overall cost structure and optimize their ability to operate and maintain these public systems and services they provide at a lower cost structure. When you combine these three together, it really gives the whole picture of why we do the technology that we do, and why we develop the technology we do.” 

Valeria Torrealba is an opinions columnist and public relations assistant at the University Star, a student publication of Texas State University. She can be reached at reporter@sasentinel.com.