Business View Civil and Municipal | May 2021

162 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL MAY 2021 lighting solution is employed, Flaherty explains that although streetlights are usually turned on at sunset, the brightness level can be varied through the night-time hours. “Many of our customers take advantage of the scheduling features in our product. When streetlights are switched on at or before sunset, they usually employ a high brightness level when the majority of people are traveling and moving about. Then, maybe around midnight, there’s usually far less activity out on the streets so you don’t need the same level of brightness. The scheduling capability of our intelligent controller can dim the lights to a predetermined level at a predetermined time. For example, between midnight and 5 am, you have the lights at half brightness – which for LED lights is still fairly bright – you’ve now reduced your energy usage during those hours where most people are sleeping. This is not possible with regular photocells unless a crew goes out to the fixture to adjust the light settings.” The result is a reduction in energy costs, as well as light pollution, and the city or utility is being a good steward of an important resource. This touches upon one of the important benefits of CIMCON’s technology: environmental sustainability. Many cities have signed up to do ‘green’ initiatives, and smart lighting can reduce energy wastage. It is, however, not the only benefit to emerge from the use of smart lighting. “The other nice benefit made possible by the management software, Lighting Gale, and the lighting controllers are for special events,” says Flaherty. “The example I like to use here concerns the Boston area where there are several different festivals during the year. Wouldn’t it be great for lights to remain at a brighter level later in the evening during those festivals rather than remain on the usual daily schedule? This is easily set up thought our software.” In terms of maintenance, CIMCON’s intelligent lighting controls are also hugely advantageous. “We can tell from the data we’re collecting if a fixture might be misbehaving and possibly malfunction in the near future,” Flaherty notes. “So, the controllers will send this data to our central management software (CMS) which then analyses the data and can take action such as sending an alert the city or the lighting department to go out to a specific location with a clear understanding of the issue and deal with that problem before it causes an outage.” Through a combination of CIMCON’s lighting controls and LightingGale CMS, cities can typically reduce maintenance and repair truck rolls from an average of almost three trips per incident down to a single trip and eliminate the need for night-time patrols, resulting in tremendous cost savings, while maintaining resident safety. The greater visibility that CIMCON provides into a city’s lighting network delivers concrete financial benefits. Flaherty reports, “Recently, one of our customers told us that over the past year, they saw a reduction in the number of truck -rolls (visits to the pole) from an average of 1,500 per year down to approximately 600. A truck-roll is typically initiated to visit lighting fixtures, based on complaints, to conduct maintenance or install replacements. An average city might spend roughly $300 per truck-roll at a minimum just to get the truck out there. With the data we’re collecting, we help cities either resolve a problem without sending somebody out or, when they do send somebody, we can help ensure they have the right parts, are aware of the exact problem, and can fix it in a single visit in most cases. Our technology reduced the average number of truck-rolls per incident from 2.9 down to 1.5. Added up across an entire city’s population of streetlights and possible incidents, this represents huge operational savings – every year!” CIMCON sees its smart street lighting solution as the starting point for a broader smart city vision. A lot of cities are revamping their street