Efficient Management of Energy Consumption by Public Street Lights

Project Highlights

Intelligent Lighting Systems U3, a students’ team from IIT Madras, Chennai is doing a project in the urban areas/cities sector.

Streets, parks and other public facilities serve as a major drain on a city’s energy resources. Chennai city uses 27.61MW of power which is around 20% of the total energy on street-lighting. This is ~233 tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere per day. Globally 18-38% of the total electric power is consumed by street lighting. At the same time, the global demand for electricity keeps increasing day by day.

Hence we must decrease the energy consumed by streetlights. This is possible as people won’t be using the streets for all the 12hrs in the night and streetlights need not be at maximum brightness at these times.

Who is Behind this Project?

The team is led by Mr. Shashank Ramesh and the team members are

Shashank Ramesh
Abhishek Nair
Arunabh Srivastava
Prakhar Thakuria
Sushant Wadavkar

What is the Project all about?

This project overcomes this problem by using i-lighting sensor based interactive system for steet lights. Through this, a saving of 45% of energy is possible. This system detects human presence using sensors and accordingly makes the light dim or bright using the dimmer module.

What is the Uniqueness of the Solution?

Adopting mesh networking in the system of street lights for synchronization.
Mesh networking also enables us to prioritize safety while building our system. When any vehicle/pedestrian is detected an adequate number of streetlights in the vicinity are brightened so as to make sure that their movement is not hindered.
Devised a way to use low cost components. This minimizes the cost of production when compared to existing solutions.
Slave systems use Radio Frequency modules for communication which are much cheaper than Wi-Fi modules.

What is the Potential Market?