Intelligent management of public lighting, Reggio Emilia, Italy

Energy saving with Reverberi SEC STP controllers and remote control system.

BACKGROUND

During 2006, thanks to the decision of the local Municipality to start a serious project towards energy saving and the re-organization of the maintenance system, a tender was launched for the assignment in Global Service of the public illumination systems, of the traffic lights system and of the Energy services.

THE SOLUTION

The agreement jobs are:

• Use of flow regulator for new and old systems with power higher than 10 kW
• Use of an centralized auto-management system for the detection of failures in real time, for the optimization of the working conditions of the systems and for the smart management of the maintenance services;
• Substitution of the obsolete luminaires either with mercury lamps or high pressure sodium lamps;
• Substitution of the traditional traffic lights with LED replacements;
• Full survey of the public illumination systems, with an on-map geo-referenced localization and the exact survey of the important data from the distribution boards and from the light spots.

 
The installation of the flow regulators will happen at a reasonably fast pace: the Reverberi products range was chosen, and so it was for the auto-management system, which includes the Maestro software in the server/client configuration, from the Opera range, still by Revetec.
The regulators installed on old and new systems of more than 10kW, are at presently approx. 110 units, all handled by video-supervision, and they sum up to a total installed power of 1812 kW.
The money invested only for these regulators has a forecasted payback time of 3 years.

For the survey of the completed status, Gesta provided two persons, a vehicle and a Table PC with optical pen: on a dwg format drawing supplied by the Municipality, the two men surveyed the city streets, marking the light spots and the distribution boards, as they encountered them. Following the data input, detecting the elements characteristics, they directly transferred them onto a dwg format file as attributes.

The Maestro software, installed on a server located at Gesta and accessible from the Municipality via the network, is an instrument with which the people in charge work on a daily basis for: the detection of failures in the systems, the diagnostics and the initial solution from the remote location, the management of maintenance teams and of the field technicians.
Moreover, a periodical analysis of the historical data is carried out by the flow regulators to have a brief report on the energy savings, the working hours, the precision of the indicators positioned as objectives.
The information that the system offers is a priceless base for the optimization of the systems: the optimization interventions – maximization of saving, charges balancing, installation of the lines and lamps – have all been executed as preventive actions following the readings of the data provided by the auto-management system.

THE BENEFITS

The energy saving achieved until now, following the reduction of the night flow and the stabilization of the tension on the mass, ranges between a minimum of 15 % and a maximum of 35 %, depending on the conditions of the system. The medium savings lay around the 28 % on all the operating systems.
In fact, in some occasions, tension failures on underproportioned lines, the use of fluorescent bulbs and the system characteristics, did not allow a significant consumption reduction, for which the detriment of the service level might have been inevitable.