Itron Inc, Vinci Energies’ Electrix and Transport Canberra and City Services (TCCS) are working together to create an industrial Internet of Things network to support smart lighting and energy solutions in Canberra. TCCS, which manages streetlights and other critical infrastructure, will deploy Itron’s multi-purpose network across the region, connecting streetlights on the network that will be managed by Itron’s Streetlight.Vision central management software. This project is the largest smart lighting project in Australia and Electrix’s first energy performance contract in Australia and Oceania.

Under the energy performance contract, Electrix, a leading provider of electrical engineering, construction and maintenance services, will operate, maintain and upgrade the streetlight network over seven years. This will help TCCS achieve significant energy savings, accelerate progress toward environmental goals, minimise investment risks and help manage expenditure to fixed annual allocated budgets.

Initial benefits include increased electrical safety and energy savings from energy-efficient fittings, which can be tracked with metering on the lights. In the long term, Canberra will benefit from a Smart City Lab, which will be developed to test and develop additional projects such as smart waste management, traffic monitoring, pollution sensing and other applications using the same network platform. A new digital control maintenance management system will also offer real-time monitoring of the network to automatically detect faults such as lamp failures or cable problems.

The seven-year collaboration will focus on three key outcomes: keeping the lights on, becoming energy efficient and contributing to Canberra being a smart city.

“Itron’s open standards-based, globally proven smart city network is the ideal platform to help councils and governments like TCCS to realise its vision to transform critical city services for consumers,” says Paul Nelsen, Itron’s vice-president of commercial and customer enablement for the Asia-Pacific region. “We are excited to work with TCCS and Electrix on this innovative project, which showcases the power of collaboration and creativity. Together, we will develop a strategic, scalable process for rolling out smart city applications under a single, unified network.”

Electrix’s general manager Tony Croagh says, “Electrix has extensive local expertise in maintenance of electrical infrastructure, particularly street lighting. We are excited to apply our experience in collaboration with TCCS and Itron on this unique project.”