SOUTH China
super smart cities
The Pearl of Guangdong recently fitted 14,051 units of smart LED street lighting across the city, making savings of more than 70% on energy usage throughout the course of the year. Foshan City is regionally renowned for its smart-city solutions and environmental reforms, making it a ground-breaker in the Chinese context. But the latest round of innovations is impressive even by Foshan standards. Foshan has been upgrading much of its infrastructure, architecture and industrial projects in recent years, as part of a broader smart city urbanisation initiative.
South China's Super Smart Cities
December 12, 2014
Cities across China, and the wider world, are creating smart cities with a strong focus on utilising information and communications technologies as an integral part of a city's infrastructure. The integration of city services, administration, healthcare, public safety, public transport and utilities into this overarching smart-city system allows for freedom of access to essential information, and for the overall improvement of city living. Another Chinese example is the Xinjiang Smart City, where residents can access anything from real-time traffic camera images to bus arrival times from their mobile phones. Across China, payment by mobile phone transaction is becoming increasingly popular, highlighting the rising scope of the Internet of Things in the Chinese marketplace.
Foshan's street lighting upgrade is part of a wider national picture, responding to the rapid urbanisation of the Chinese populace. According to the European Chamber of Commerce, cities consume 75 per cent of the world’s energy resources and emit 80 per cent of the carbon that is harming the environment. By targeting energy useage, Foshan City takes a step in the direction of sustainable, smart city planning. Though it is far from a giant leap for any city, investments such as these a few and far between, with the costs of creating smart city projects discouraging many municipal governments from pursuing them.
By integrating CMS into the project, it can significantly reduce electricity consumption at least by 30 percent and lower maintenance cost by at least 40 percent. That’s a total of at least a 70 percent savings in energy.
Yiqiang Lee, CEO of Rongwen
Foshan has been upgrading much of its infrastructure, architecture and industrial projects in recent years, as part of a broader smart city urbanisation initiative.
With industrial parks such as the Foshan New City combining European techniques with Chinese needs, the entirety of Foshan will become a model city for sustainable urban planning and development.
The Guangdong Rongwen Energy Science and Technology group have been part of a retrofitting projects aiming to dramatically reduce Foshan’s energy usage.
Not only are the new streetlights great energy savers, they also use a high-tech server that optimises street lighting control networks. Each LED streetlight has an integrated intelligent control module capable of receiving commands and sending data to the iLon Smart server for management and maintenance.
Rongwen used Customer Management Systems to manage the system and to support the different dimming scenarios required by the Foshan government. The system also supports cameras and light sensors, to complete the smart city lighting picture.
Image credit: shutterstock
Written by Bey Critical
The new lights save up to 75% in energy consumption...
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That's 13.50 million kilowatts saved each year.
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The smart system decreased maintenance costs by up to 30%...
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And reduced intallation costs by 20%.
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In the first year, the rate of failure was less than 2%.
