IOT, Sensors, & Street Lights

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.

Why not we?