India is a huge energy
consumption country. Already, it is in energy deficit. In the coming years, its
need for power is going to be exponential. If energy consumption is treated as
one of the parameters to judge whether a country is developing, then one needs
to consider that India is growing. But, is really India growing? Or going to
become at least a lion or tiger of the Asian economies? The answer is a
reverberating NO. Just because some country is consuming more power does not
mean it is growing in a positive way. May be it is wasting precious power with
its unsophisticated implementation methodologies and due to that reason; it is
in thirst of more power! When it comes to India, power wastage is one of the
prime reasons why it needs more power in the coming years; just to run the same
old electric equipment.
Power wastage happens in so many
ways; for example, a metropolitan city authority lits its streets daily 12
hours during the evening time. The street lights get switched ON by
approximately 6 pm and run for the next 12 hours uninterruptedly. However,
public uses this artificial lightning for the first 6 hours only. Since public spends
time the next 6 hours sleeping in their respective houses, the streets are
empty but the lights continuously glow in turn wasting lot of energy. So, how
can countries like India can save power and use it judiciously even in
situations like this?
Smart power handling by using
sensors and implementation of IOT is the answer for this kind of situation.
With IOT, you can connect all the street lights to a central hub. This helps to
monitor and track all the street lights 24/7; including their brightness levels.
Now, to know when to lit street lights automatically, weather and sound
capturing sensors help you. For example, if suddenly the sunny weather turns
cloudy, immediately, the weather sensor identifies the change and sends a
signal to light up the impacted area street lights.
People switch off lights every
night in their homes. Why not governments apply the same logic to street
lights? When no one is there, they can switch off the light. And they can ON
the light only when there is some movement. But, how the street light knows
whether there are people on the street at any point of time? In this scenario,
sound capturing sensors come into picture. These sensors capture sounds that
are beyond a certain decibel. And based on that cue, they send signal to the
street light to switch ON. If they won’t listen any sound for a certain period
of time (based on configuration!), then they send switch off signal to the
street light. This way, India can save huge energy. Whatever energy deficit is
there right now, by saving that India can fill the deficit up to a certain significant
percentage.
The buzzing word right now across
geographies is ‘smart cities’. First world countries are already implementing
these techniques and are leveraging lot of potential from their existing
resources.
