Smart Pole and Intelligent Street light project

Bhopal has launched first of its kind public private partnership (PPP) based smart poles and intelligent street lights project in India under the Smart Cities Mission. The project is innovatively structured in such a manner that it delivers bundled smart services to citizens and maximum values for money to the city authority.

There are two parallel part of this project:

• Smart pole installation across the city: 400 Smart pole to be installed
• LED street light installation: 20,000 LED street lights to be installed by replacing the conventional sodium lamps and mercury lamps.
• Smart Pole:

Smart Pole offers multiple services to the city residents. The integral parts of the smart pole are as below:

• Smart pole has telecom tower infrastructure to match with city aesthetic and ready to accommodate upcoming technology as 4G and 5G
• Energy efficient and remotely controllable LED Street Lights
• Wi-Fi hotspot services for the city
• Surveillance cameras for safety and parking violation detection
• Environmental Sensors to monitor Airquality, temperatureandhumidity
• Electric Vehicle charging points to promote use of electric vehicles in the city
• Mobile based application with functionality of SoS
• Centralizes Command and Control centre for monitoring the implementation of smart solutions.
• Optical fiber for better bandwidth to the Wi-Fi users/providing backhaul to telecom operators.

Benefits of Smart Pole:

• Unlike the conventional telecom tower, Smart pole looks good and matches with city infrastructure. It has the telecom power infrastructure in built to facilitate telecom operators to place their equipment
• Smart pole has Li- ion batteries to eliminate Diesel generator as secondary power source. Li-ion battery provides the back up during electricity outage
• Implementation of LED Street lights help to improve the quality of life of city residents by improving the city lighting.
• Wi-Fi connectivity at 100 Hot Spots locations where city resident foot fall is increasing. It provides free Wi Fi for defined time periods to the registered users.
• Optical fiber networks across the city ensures robust connectivity and enable the city to accommodate future technologies. It will also help to establish connectivity between Government departments, City infrastructure and Command & Control Center.
• Camera surveillance ensures the safety, security and parking management in the city.
• Charging facility for electric vehicles through EV Charging Points will encourage the use on electric vehicle which will help to reduce carbon foot print
• Digital advertising panels across the city through smart bill boards will keep the city residents updated with city information and provide the platform to the corporates for promotion.
• SOS application for emergency, distress, citizen’s response system will facilitate the city residents with quick response in case of emergency.
• Mobile application for citizen services will help the citizens to use the government service through smart phone.

1. LED Street Lights:
   
   Smart pole project is planned for 400 poles to be installed in the city to cover the entire city area and in parallel to this 20000 LED street lights to be installed which will replace the conventional street lighting. The benefits of replacing conventional lighting with LED street lights are as below:

• LEDs have extremely long lives compared to conventional lamps.
• LED luminaries don't have filaments that can quickly burn out and they don't contain toxic chemicals like mercury, unlike traditional high-pressure sodium lamps or mercury-vapor lamps.
• LED luminaries can last 70,000 hours approx., also have reduced maintenance costs because of their long lives.
• LED luminaries produce less heat than other bulbs. As it provides more lumens per watt than conventional lamps
• LEDs are suitable for places where replacing light bulbs is expensive, inconvenient or otherwise difficult.
• LEDs are highly energy efficient. While compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) recently have been touted as the standard in green lighting, LEDs actually have double their energy efficiency
• LED use 15 percent of the energy of an incandescent bulb while generating more light per watt. LEDs produce approx 80 lumens per watt, traditional streetlights can only muster 58 lumens per watt
• Energy efficient LED helps to reduce carbon emission.
  
  Additional key financial benefits of this projects are:

• Better governance and coordination through centralized command and control center
• Zero capital investment for Smart Street Lights
• Zero operation and maintenance cost for 15 years
• Leveraging investment of Rs. 600 corers for city infrastructure
• Annual premium on revenue sharing model
• Better and smart services to citizens

Challenges faced during implementation and solution to overcome:

1. The biggest challenge is to gather the data of existing LED lights, Pole and feeder panel status. As the city area is big and multiple kind of street light were installed previously, the survey of the existing setup with lighting requirement was a difficult task.
   BSCDCL has appointed an external agency ERDA to do the complete survey of LED street light project to gather the information about the lighting requirement and existing set up. On the other hand the concessionaire appointed for the installation of LED light has also performed a survey to provide the right solution. Concessionaire has done the survey of existing street light and relevant components.

2. There were many existing installation observed with old poles and damaged brackets. The replacement of existing brackets and poles were big challenge.
   BSCDCL has allowed the concessionaire to use the existing good condition brackets, so that the street esthetic does not change. The areas where the new brackets were required BSCDCL has allowed to change all the brackets of the street.

3. There was a challenge to remotely turn ON/ OFF the street light so that the energy can be saved and another challenge was to know the faulty street lights and their location.
   The LED light solution ordered by BSCDCL has the remote communication and remote controlling feature so that the data can be captured form LED lights and remote controlling can be done.
   Remote monitoring feature enables to communicate:
   • LED light energy consumption data
   • ON/ OFF status
   • Fault status
   • LED street light location
   • Street light ON/OFF timing
   
   Remote controlling features enables to control:
   • ON/OFF timing
   • Group Control
   • Individual Control

4. To choose the location of smart pole was a challenge so that the benefits of smart pole can be passed on to the city residents, and the power infrastructure designed can be used by telecom operators.
   
   BSCDCL has chosen the smart pole location keeping in mind the high foot fall areas, important junctions and call drop areas so that the maximum benefits can be obtained.