Energy saving potential of adaptive street lighting

Electricity prices are rapidly increasing in Europe. Adaptive street lighting projects previously considered as economically unattractive can deliver substantial energy cost saving and short-term payback. We report the energy saving potential of a pilot installation designed to comply with current lighting regulations allowing the adjustment of the power of street lights according to the actual traffic conditions. Adaptive lighting enables significant energy saving in suburban areas where the traffic volume peaks in the evenings and early mornings, but traffic drops to very low level during the night. The decrease of the traffic volume enables the illuminance level and hence the power of the luminaires to be reduced. The system architecture and the principle of operation of an adaptive street lighting pilot comprising five LED luminaires equipped with NB IoT communication modules and traffic monitoring sensors are presented. The methodology used in this study can be tailored to estimate the energy saving potential of any other street lighting application.