City of Clermont-Ferrand Reduces Street-Light Operating Costs by 40% per Annum with Sogexi and Sierra Wireless

Sogexi, who was awarded the contract by the City in 2011, had already been working with Sierra Wireless for several years to integrate an AirLink® programmable modem into its solution to provide wireless access. In such a solution, host processors are housed in control units across the city, which aggregate groups of streetlight fixtures and are able to control every individual street lamp. The AirLink device monitors the control unit and provides remote connectivity, allowing the data to be sent over the cellular network to AVMS, which stores all the data and presents it to various applications and users for action. The City is now able to monitor all 16,000 streetlight fixtures and notify maintenance crews almost immediately of any problems. While maintenance crews once relied on visual reports of problems and then corrected them, typically in a week, the reporting of issues happens automatically and in real time and can be corrected within a couple of hours.

With electronic control of the streetlight network, the City can leverage Sogexi management platform (based on AVMS) to configure all the fixtures based on time of year and time of day or night. For example, during the week, the City can configure lights to operate at 50% or less capacity from 22:00 to 06:00 am; and during the weekend, to operate at 75% capacity from 22:00 to 0:00, and 50% or less from 0:00 to 06:30 am. The estimated energy savings that have resulted from the overall system deployment is 35% per year, and even higher financial savings.

A City representative explained that the municipal technical services team now manages and controls the complete streetlight system, and is considering other monitoring applications using this infrastructure. “Energy prices are continuing to increase, and being able to match lighting to behaviour allows us to reduce our overall costs and impact on the environment”, said Sarah Bastide, street lighting/parks/traffic lights manager for the City.