Zhang Yang nicolezyyy@163.com THE numerous street lights installed in cities have sometimes led to an unnecessary waste of electricity. A street light control system being displayed at the 19th China Hi-Tech Fair (CHTF) offers a good solution to the problem. The system, based on Internet of Things (IoT) technology, has been developed by Cityntel, a company from Estonia. “Street lights installed in cities today are based on technology which was developed more than a century ago. Therefore they are very inefficient and cost a fortune for the city to operate,” said Alar V?rk, CEO and co-founder of the company. According to V?rk, replacing old street lights with modern LED luminaries will save a city approximately 40 percent of its electricity. Additionally, adding a smart control system to LED luminaries will double that savings, as the system reduces street light brightness during off-peak times when there are not many people on the streets. V?rk said there are many other street light control systems available on the market, but most of them are based on complicated communication architectures, meaning that they are time-consuming and expensive to deploy and maintain. “We have brought to the market the new-generation wireless mesh networking technology where all devices are in the same hierarchical level. It means that there is no more time-consuming and expensive network configuration,” he said. According to V?rk, their system’s new-generation IoT technology enables direct communication between each street light, while external sensors can share the information regarding human presence, traffic flow, weather and other factors with the street lights so that they can adjust their brightness automatically according to the actual situation. “Each street light knows its location, current date and time and sunset and sunrise time every day. They know when to switch on and off and how much brightness is needed,” V?rk said, adding that the central management system can display the whole street light installation, set operating rules for an individual or group of luminaries and notify about any malfunction. According to V?rk, the system can save up to 80 percent of the electricity and 70 percent of the maintenance costs for street lights, lowering carbon emissions and light pollution, as well as providing a longer lifetime for street lights. The street light control system was selected as the best environmentally friendly product for the Estonian Environmental Award in 2014 and won second place for the German Innovation Award. V?rk said the system has been put into use in over 20 cities across the globe, and he is looking to find potential business partners at CHTF to help him tap the market in China. | 