Japan looks to 'smarter' lighting to save energy, ensure safety

“Smarter” street lighting could help Japan manage its energy use better while ensuring safety in public spaces at night … two areas of especially great concern in the wake of the deadly earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that hit the country earlier this year.

Just such an intelligent street lighting system is now being rolled out in the city of Tsukuba. The deployment is part of the Japan Ministry of the Environment’s “2011 Challenge 25 Regional Development Project” to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and help with environmental conservation. However, it’s also expected to help the city save money without sacrificing public infrastructure or safety.

The project will use energy control networking technology from the smart-grid company Echelon, along with power line communications (PLC) on the existing infrastructure, to operate segment controllers across the city’s street lighting system. Management software will help to monitor energy consumption, save power by dimming individual lights, adjust lighting schedules and intensity as needed for public safety and identify failures and other problems on the network, making it easier to locate and repair street lights that have gone out.

It will be the first system of its kind in Japan

“Smart street lighting using PLC continues to attract our customers because it enables a tremendous cost savings by allowing them to use existing power lines to transmit data, eliminating the need to lay new communications lines,” said Tomohito Arai, general manager of the information technology business department for ITOCHU, the Japan-based Echelon distributor that will deploy the system in Tsukuba. “With our partners Echelon and Streetlight.Vision, we will not only help reduce power consumption in the city, we will also maintain proper safety and security, which is an issue in Japan due to reduced availability of street lighting after this past year’s natural disasters.”

Tsukuba, also known as Tsukuba Science City, has become a leading site for government-industry collaborations in research and scientific breakthroughs. According to Echelon, the data collected during the street lighting system improvements in Tsukuba could eventually help lead to a nationwide smart lighting strategy covering some 10 million streetlights.