Telensa, the award-winning wireless street lighting control company, has been selected to supply its PLANet street light central management system (CMS) as part of Hertfordshire County Council’s pioneering £6.5m (US $10.26) A-road improvement project, managed by highway services contractor Ringway.

More than 12,600 street lights on Hertfordshire’s A-roads are being upgraded to LED lighting and the council is simultaneously installing Telensa’s CMS to allow the lights to be monitored from a central point. This will reduce inspection costs and make it easier to spot and repair any faults.

Telensa’s CMS will also allow lighting levels on the A-roads to be reduced during the night, rather than turning lights off completely. Once the new lights are installed, light levels will be reduced by 25 per cent between 11pm and 6am on A-roads.

According to the council, the project will bring savings of around £660,000 each year from the end of 2015 onwards. The new combined LEDs and CMS system will result in reduced energy costs, lower carbon emissions, reduced maintenance and improved visibility for road users.

Hertfordshire County Council’s cabinet member for highways, Terry Douris, said: “The conversion of Hertfordshire County Council’s existing lights to this modern technology forms part of our overall commitment to maintain and improve our roads for the benefit of all road users in Hertfordshire. The Telensa system was chosen because it is field proven by scores of other UK local authorities.”

The Telensa radio infrastructure – 48 wireless base stations to cover the whole county of Hertfordshire – will be installed, tested and commissioned in advance of upgrading the street lights.

“This system gives us total flexibility,” added Mr Douris. “First, to implement this A-road upgrade, then to add on any individual streetlight columns if they require replacing, and, finally, to implement further phases of LED/CMS replacement as and when it’s economical.”

Telensa is working under contract to Ringway for the improvement project with LEDs supplied by Urbis Schréder. Work started on 17 November 2014 and is scheduled to take up to a year to complete. In order to minimise disruption, the work is being carried out during the night.

Will Gibson, CEO, Telensa, commented: “We are delighted to have been selected by Ringway on behalf of Hertfordshire County Council for this pioneering energy reducing project. The Telensa system is cost-effective, the simplest to deploy and highly scalable across large lighting populations such as that in Hertfordshire with its 114,000 street lights, the fifth largest quantity for an authority in the UK.”

Telensa’s low power ultra-narrow band (UNB) wireless control 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 5,000 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.

For more information, please visit www.telensa.com.