HPE Improves Energy Efficiency of Taoyuan City Through Real-Time Monitoring of Streetlights

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced the deployment of a new solution in Taoyuan City that enables real-time monitoring of streetlight infrastructure to improve energy efficiency and reduce energy consumption. The pilot phase of the Taoyuan City smart lighting project started with streetlights in the Taoyuan Qingpu district.

As an important trade and transportation hub housing many industrial parks and Taiwan’s largest international airport, Taoyuan City is working toward becoming a smart city and is committed to reducing pollution, carbon emissions and energy consumption. With street lighting consuming a substantial amount of energy, the city needed an end-to-end smart lighting solution that could respond to environmental data and automatically dim to improve energy efficiency.

The first-of-its-kind deployment of a streetlight management solution in Taiwan will enable Taoyuan City to monitor its streetlight infrastructure in real-time, and proactively react to failures and breakages. The intelligent edge solution – built on HPE’s Edgeline Converged Edge Systems – will integrate 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. The automatic configuration in output power of streetlights will ensure that lighting conditions are optimally set at any given time. This will reduce Taoyuan City’s energy consumption costs by up to 40%.

“Street lighting continues to be an increasing expense on any major city’s maintenance and electricity budgets. 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,” said Cheng Wen-Tsan, Mayor of Taoyuan City. “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.”

The HPE Innovation Center in Singapore and the HPE Pointnext team partnered with gridComm, a Singapore-based smart city solutions company, to design and implement the solution in the pilot phase of the project. The solution fully integrates 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, MD, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Taiwan. “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 intervention for maintenance and energy consumption.”

As countries push for the creation of smart cities, smart lighting remains one of the top use cases identified by IDC<, who also projected a $34 billion spending in smart city technology in 2018 growing at 17% CAGR over 2018-2022 in the Asia Pacific region including China and Japan.

Announced during the opening of HPE’s APAC headquarters in Singapore in May 2017, the InnovateNext program is an HPE incubator that partners with local companies to ideate, co-innovate and commercialize new technologies. As the first InnovateNext startup participant, Singapore-based gridComm worked with HPE to conceptualize smart lighting solutions leveraging real-time data powered by HPE technology. The pilot deployment of the streetlight management system in Taoyuan City is HPE and gridComm’s first joint commercial deployment in the Asia Pacific region.

The HPE streetlight management system is now available for deployment in Asia Pacific markets.