Apr 7 2008
Echelon Corporation announced today that Philips Lighting, one of the world's leading providers of lighting systems, has built its new Starsense street light telemanagement system using Echelon's LonWorks® platform. Using Echelon's power line transceivers to communicate between lighting fixtures and Echelon's i.LON® SmartServer to provide Internet access and local monitoring and control, Starsense can deliver energy savings of over 40 percent, reducing cities' energy bills and carbon footprint. The announcement was made today at the 2008 Light+Building event in Frankfurt, Germany, the world's largest tradeshow dedicated to the lighting industry.
“Philips today highlighted the very significant energy savings and CO2 reductions to be gained from a new generation of innovative lighting technology. These opportunities address some of the fundamental issues we face today — such as energy consumption, global climate change, and the need to improve European competitiveness. Today, energy efficient lighting is required in all sectors, including city streetlights, and our Starsense system meets this need,” said Gil Soto Tolosa, European product marketing manager for road lighting at Philips Lighting. “We built our Starsense system on Echelon's platform because Echelon has a proven history of providing innovative, reliable products that let us build market-leading functionality into our systems. Working with Echelon, we believe we have created a future-proof solution that offers a significant improvement in functionality that also costs less to install and maintain.”
Streetlight systems are expensive for cities to operate and maintain. They also use a lot of energy — representing almost 40 percent of a typical city's electricity spending. Starsense uses Echelon's power line technology to reduce installation and deployment costs, turning the existing power lines running to each light pole into a reliable communications network. And, leveraging the new user-programmability feature of Echelon's i.LON Smart Server, Philips has added its know-how into the system to save even more energy and reduce commissioning and operating costs.
The savings potential for such a system is significant. The ability to remotely adjust light levels based on time, traffic, weather, and other factors can dramatically reduce energy consumption saving cities money and helping them meet their Kyoto commitments for CO2 emission reductions. Analysts have estimated, for example, that the New York City metropolitan area could save over 275,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions annually, or the equivalent of removing 50,677 cars from the road, by switching to an energy-efficient streetlight system. (http://www.echelon.com/solutions/streetlight/documents/FordFellowship StreetlightsWhitePaper3-8-08.pdf)
“We are pleased that Philips has built its new energy saving streetlight solution using our LonWorks products and platform,” said Anders Axelsson, Echelon's senior vice president of sales and marketing. “By adopting LonWorks-based smart street lighting solutions, cities worldwide could save millions of tons of CO2 emissions annually. As energy costs continue to rise and as cities look for ways to take action to both curb their costs and reduce their carbon emissions, we believe products like the new Starsense system will play an important and growing role.”