Flashnet solution to power up 75k smart streetlamps in Washington, D.C.

The smart city transformation of Washington, D.C. will be powered by 75,000 inteliLIGHT® streetlight controllers. The $309 million project will reduce energy use by more than 50%, improve equity of service, and extend Wi-Fi coverage in underserved neighborhoods.

Today, the District of Columbia's maintenance services department relies on its citizens to contact them to identify streetlight malfunctions. This is because the current urban lighting in Washington is based on older, high energy-consuming sodium lamps and remote monitoring and control was not yet available. That is about to change.

The District's vision for a smarter, safer and more energy efficient city has brought intelligent urban lighting to the attention of the City Council, which recently approved a project to convert all the city's street lights to energy-efficient LED technology with remote monitoring and control capabilities. The project plans to reduce the energy consumption by more than 50%, optimizing maintenance operations and enabling safer, more connected communities.

The new LED streetlights in D.C. will use inteliLIGHT smart street lighting NEMA controllers to provide individual lamp control and monitoring capabilities, city-wide grid awareness and real-time malfunction alerts. The project will use inteliLIGHT's Streetlight Control Software to manage the lighting, while using API connectivity to integrate with the existing maintenance and workforce management software.

Another essential part of the project, communication security is of paramount importance for the US capital. The implementation team decided to use pre-existing carrier-grade NB-IoT / LTE-M connectivity, with multi-operator cellular fallback to ensure redundancy and 15 years pre-paid connectivity, to avoid adding up to the operational fees.