Telensa Enhances Street Light Control System with On-board GPS, 7-pin NEMA and Traffic Flow Adaptive Lighting

• Additional product features – including an enhanced user interface and new low profile telecell node – designed to consolidate market-leading position and deliver 20-30 per cent energy and efficiency savings
• Telensa unveils new products at Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) Street and Area Lighting Conference, September 14-17, Gaylord Opryland Hotel, Nashville, Tennessee

Telensa (www.telensa.com), the wireless street lighting control company, has enhanced its market-leading PLANet SmartGrid street light control system by adding an on-board GPS module and the new NEMA 7-pin connector to its telecell options.

The British company has also unveiled a raft of other new features for its PLANet system including adaptive lighting controls for traffic flow monitoring, an enhanced user interface, built-in constant light output, multiple dimming levels, override functionality and a new look low profile telecell node for better aesthetics.

The new features will help consolidate Telensa’s PLANet (Public Lighting Active Network) street lighting central management system’s (CMS) industry leading position and deliver further energy saving and efficiency improvements to public authorities and smart grid operators. These savings can be broken down into different areas – trimming, dimming, dynamic dimming, maintenance, night scouting and carbon reduction.

Will Gibson, CEO, Telensa, commented: “As energy costs soar and street lighting engineers embrace the use of LED technology, we want to show that our field proven low power ultra-narrow band (UNB) wireless control system delivers the features the market requires and offers considerable savings of between 20-30 per cent over and above the savings made from switching to LEDs.

“With a track record of large scale system deployment of more than one hundred thousand lights and with systems in place across the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific and China, Telensa continues to expand its market-leading position with successful installations and additional new products and features.”

Telensa’s new low profile telecell unit features the industry-standard NEMA ANSI C136.41 7-pin connector providing simplified installation and a standardised dimming capability for compatibility with multiple lighting vendors – the extra pins providing a level of future proofing.

The self-contained, fully configurable and programmable telecell control unit now puts itself on the map due to an on-board GPS. It also offers on-board light sensor and astronomical clock, in addition to the radio control processor, street light controller, monitoring circuitry and a ‘revenue grade’ electricity metering chip.

Responding to the requirement for dynamic dimming - the right light at the right time in the right place, Telensa has added adaptive lighting to its PLANet system to allow the implementation of dimming programmes linked to traffic flow. This has been successfully trialled in San Francisco by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

“It is now possible to link the outputs from traffic detection systems directly to our CMS and dynamically control the lighting based on real time traffic flow,” added Will Gibson. “With talk of ‘the Internet of Things’ all the rage, having our CMS in place for street lighting provides an excellent platform to deliver further savings and services as new applications are added.”

For example, Telensa is already partnering with its sister company Senaptic (www.senaptic.com) to offer customers and network operators full Smart City solutions including smart metering, demand management and smart parking.

Telensa’s PLANet system comprises control and monitoring nodes (telecells) fitted to street lights which then connect wirelessly to a base station and onto a central system server.  Each base station can accommodate up to 10,000 telecells over a range of 1-2 miles or 2-3km (urban) and 3-5 miles or 5-8km (rural). Wide area coverage is then achieved by linking these base stations in a cellular architecture creating networks of several hundred thousand lights across hundreds of square miles.

The PLANet system accurately controls switching and dimming of street lights. It also measures energy and detects faulty street lights and helps municipalities and smart grid operators to manage energy consumption and deliver improved maintenance and significant savings on energy bills. It can also be applied to all types of lighting fixtures, retro or new build deployments and works with a wide range of lamp types including LEDs.

For more information about Telensa’s PLANet system, telephone +44 (0) 1799 533200 (Europe and Rest of World), +1 (770) 726-0166 (North America) or email enquiries@telensa.com.