The city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, has announced it will be deploying a smart street lights solution. Halifax is the capital city of Nova Scotia and, with more than 400,000 residents and a geographic area covering almost 2,500 sq miles, is the largest municipal area in Canada’s maritime provinces.
The system, Streetlight Vision control software, produced by Silver Springs Networks, will network 43,000 LED luminaires provided by LED Roadway Lighting Ltd.
“We all want to live in safe, healthy communities. That includes well-lit streets, roads and public spaces,” said Angus Doyle, project manager for the street light conversion project and Utilities Coordination Manager with the Halifax Regional Municipality. “Silver Spring’s adaptive lighting platform offers real-time monitoring of our street lights, which eliminates the need for residents to phone in outages and allows us to better manage maintenance and replace burnt out lights much sooner. It also opens doors for future smart city applications in Halifax, anything from water and electric meter readings to advertising panels and traffic counters.”
Intelligent lighting systems, while as-yet not commonplace, have become more viable options for those cities and municipalities looking to curb costs and increase energy savings towardgood environmental stewardship. Improvements in system reliability, increased energy efficiency, lower operational costs, extended equipment lifespans, and enhanced citizen safety and quality of life have all been cited by Halifax officials as reasons behind the new network system employment
Other global cities that have adopted similar intelligent lighting networks include Chicago, Copenhagen, Glasgow, Paris, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Singapore and Washington D.C.