Echelon to Participate in E-Street with Intelligent Street Lighting
Echelon Corp. announced that it will participate in the E-Street initiative, a research group aimed at further developing a solution for reducing energy usage in outdoor lighting systems in the European Union (EU). E-Street, the Intelligent Road and Street Lighting panel, is comprised of the world's leading companies experienced in producing intelligent, networked streetlight systems that can provide as much as a 70% reduction in energy usage.
E-Street is part of the EU's Intelligent Energy Europe program designed to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy sources. The E-Street initiative will play a pivotal role in determining EU standards and legislation for managed outdoor lighting systems.
"Extending the power of control networks to streetlight systems not only allows cities to drastically reduce energy and maintenance costs, but this increased efficiency also reduces energy waste, correspondingly reducing CO2 emissions affiliated with energy production," said Henk Walraven, managing director, Central Europe Middle East and Africa, Echelon Corp. "A smart, networked streetlight system offers immediate and substantial cost savings, and the overall return on investment time is quite impressive, allowing cities to quickly see benefits from the new system."
Traditional streetlight systems use mechanical ballasts that are either fully on or off. Such ballasts waste energy because they remain on at a constant light level throughout the night, causing streetlights to account for the largest percentage of energy usage of a town and contributing to CO2 emissions worldwide due to inefficient energy consumption.
These older systems are expensive and cumbersome to maintain, relying on resident notification or drive-bys to determine which lights are no longer functioning properly. Furthermore, because such systems are always at maximum light output when they are on, they are a chief cause of light pollution, a concern in growing urban areas where night time lighting levels continue to intensify.
Applying Echelon's control networking technology to public lighting systems transforms them into dynamic networks that can reduce energy use, increase public safety through intelligent yet invisible interactions with the surrounding environment, reduce maintenance and long-term system costs, and can act as the infrastructure for additional beneficial applications like intelligent traffic routing.
