Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has partnered with Singapore-based gridComm in a first-of-its-kind deployment of a streetlight management solution in Taiwan.
The solution aims to provide real-time monitoring of streetlight infrastructure, improving energy efficiency and reducing energy consumption from streetlights across Taiwan’s Taoyuan City.
"Street lighting continues to be an increasing expense on any major city’s maintenance and electricity budgets,” said Cheng Wen-Tsan, mayor of Taoyuan City.
"Taoyuan City needed a streetlight solution that could respond in real-time to changing environmental conditions to ensure optimal street lighting conditions for our citizens and road users."
IDC has projected that spending worth US$34 billion in smart city technology will occur in 2018 with a 17 per cent growth expectation over 2018-2022 in the Asia Pacific region, including China and Japan.
"We also see future opportunities to create a city-wide central nervous system that aggregates data on weather, pollution, parking, traffic and environmental conditions to enable us to fully realize our vision of being a smart city,” added Cheng.
In partnership with the HPE innovation centre in Singapore and the HPE Pointnext team, the solution will integrate gridComm’s SmartLight technology, which provides hybrid power line communications (PLC)-radio frequency (RF) devices and systems, and HPE’s data management platform.
"Taoyuan City was looking to leverage the sensor data it was collecting across the city for more intelligent city planning decisions,” said Jon Wang, managing director of Taiwan at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
"The integrated end-to-end intelligent edge solution powered by HPE technology delivered the requisite monitoring across multiple sensors into a central platform that enables Taoyuan City to reduce both manual interventions for maintenance and energy consumption."
The pilot phases started in the Taoyuan Qingpu district of Taoyuan City and will enable the city to monitor its streetlight infrastructure in real-time, enabling the city to proactively react to failures and breakages.
HPE will leverage its intelligence edge solution, the Edgeline Converged Edge Systems, integrating multiple operational technologies (OT) such as smart sensor devices collecting data on current lighting conditions, humidity levels, temperature, wind speed and water levels into a single command and control platform.
Furthermore, intelligent edge systems are a significant focus for HPE with HPE's CEO Antonio Neri committing US$4 billion over the next four years for the segment.
A 40 per cent reduction in energy consumption costs are expected for Taoyuan City through the automatic configuration in the output power of streetlights that will ensure that lighting conditions are optimally set at any given time.
Meanwhile, gridComm was the first participant in HPE’s incubator InnovateNext program that launched in Singapore in May 2017 during the opening of HPE’s APAC headquarters.
The Taoyuan City streetlight management system deployment is the first commercial deployment in the Asia Pacific region that HPE and gridComm have worked on together.
