LED street lights
Kitchener’s new system will form ‘smart city’ network
KITCHENER — Crews are fanning across the city this fall, installing more than 16,000 energy-efficient street lights to create a city-wide network of smart sensors.
City councillors and staff held a news conference Thursday to show off the new technology which they say will allow a host of new digital ways to provide better service in everything from garbage bins to water meters and parking lots.
“We’re taking the next steps forward to build a city of the future that will connect people in ways that we have only imagined,” said Mayor Berry Vrbanovic.
The street lights and their sensors will mean Kitchener is one of the first cities in the country with a city-wide “Internet of Things” network, he said.
The city is spending $5 million to install the new LED street lights, as part of a regionwide effort to save energy and money by using the more energy-efficient bulbs. The energy savings will pay for the new lights in about seven years, but they’re expected to last up to 20 years.
But Kitchener went a step further than the other municipalities in the region, opting to spend $2 million more to install the network of smart sensors in the street lights. The sensors connect all the lights in the city in a digital web that covers the entire city and that can be used for a host of applications:
Smart meters in homes could monitor natural gas and water usage and use the network to send the information wirelessly to utilities, saving on meter reading costs and alerting homeowners quickly to unusual spikes in usage.
Sensors in city garbage bins would alert workers when they’re full.
The network could be used to track where parking spaces are available in city lots, to monitor real-time traffic flows, and even gauge snow or black ice build up on streets.
The city figures it will save $300,000 in energy costs from the new lighting in 2017-18, and has earmarked that money to fund a new Civic Innovation Lab to come
up with ways to capitalize on the new sensor network. That lab should be fully staffed by early 2018, and by spring or summer should be coming up with ways the city can capitalize on its wireless network.
“We have ideas for how we can use the technology,” said Justin Watkins, manager of digital strategy at the city. “The cool thing is there are many solutions that we don’t even know about yet.”
For now, though, the new technology will allow city staff to dim individual lights if they’re shining more brightly than necessary. In the middle of the night, lights can be dimmed even further, resulting in more energy savings.
Some residents worry the LED lights will cause light pollution. But the bulbs have a warmer light that meets the American Medical Association’s recommendation for safe LED lights. The lights also have full cutoff lamps that reduce spillage. “The light shines straight down,” said Justin Readman, the city’s interim director of infrastructure. “You don’t even see the light bulb when you’re two or three poles away.”
You can track the progress of the street light conversion online