Echelon Partners with ITOCHU and Mitsui on Street Lighting Control System Pilots in Japan
New Pilots in Tsukuba, Higashi Matsushima, and Hiroshima Demonstrate Growing Momentum
Echelon Corporation announced that building on the successful demonstration of intelligent street lighting control in the Japanese technology city of Tsukuba in 2011, several leading Japanese cities are now piloting street lighting management systems based on technology from Echelon. The systems being piloted are built on the open ISO/IEC 14908 standard and implemented using Echelon’s Power Line Communications (PLC) transceivers and segment controllers. Echelon partner ITOCHU Corporation has installed the second phase in the city of Tsukuba. It was accomplished in cooperation with major Japanese lighting device manufacturers, Panasonic and Toshiba.
ITOCHU, as Echelon’s master distributor in Japan, also collaborated with a new market entrant, Mitsui & Company for two pilot sites. Mitsui has installed the systems in the city of Higashi Matsushima, part of the earthquake damaged region of Tohoku, and at the campus of Hiroshima City University in the city of Hiroshima. The ISO 14908 based solution being deployed supports a variety of luminaires ranging from LEDs from Toshiba and GE to Ceramic Metal Halide lights from GS Yuasa. Relative to just using high-efficiency lamps, street light management systems further lower energy use and reduce the cost of operating the street light infrastructure. ITOCHU has successfully developed those lighting device manufacturers with Echelon’s new CPD3000 Outdoor Lighting Controllers.
In Hiroshima, where rising Japanese electricity prices now make it comparable to high cost Asia-Pacific locations like Australia and the Philippines, the change-out of High Pressure Sodium (HPS) lamps to dimmable LEDs, is lowering per lamp electricity consumption by more than 50% or nearly 120Kg of CO2 per year, and is expected to save approximately $240/year. The use of the control system to set dimming schedules based on weather and traffic patterns delivers 20% to 30% of the savings relative to just shifting from HPS to LED. Additionally, all the pilots involve the monitoring of lamps from a centralized city location so that failures can be identified and responded to quickly, thereby increasing public safety while reducing maintenance costs.
“In addition to reducing energy costs and maintenance costs, the use of a standards-based control system allows the cities to manage life cycle procurement costs by providing them with a choice of luminaires, an expense that is often more than 80% of the cost of the project,” said Varun Nagaraj, Senior Vice President at Echelon Corporation. “We are excited to be partnering with ITOCHU and Mitsui – two of Japan’s leading solution providers – and look forward to larger roll-outs across these cities over the next few years.”