"Smart" Streetlights Hit the Streets
How do you get 100 lighting industry executives to ooh and aah when they look at a streetlight?
Apparently, by turning it on and off using a cellphone.
That’s what a Pacific Gas and Electric employee did in the streets of San Francisco last Tuesday night, much to the delight of the crowd who had trekked over from a Department of Energy conference on LED lighting a few blocks away.
This was more than a parlor trick; in actuality, it was a demonstration of what could eventually become a system of “smart” streetlights, lamps that could be controlled from a central point, turned on and off, dimmed, and even flashed continually in an emergency, much like a car’s four-way flashers. All of that was shown the other night.
Today’s streetlamps are dumb. They turn on when a photocell attached to them reacts to the darkness, and off when the sun comes up. They burn at one level of power, and when they burn out, the only way anyone knows is if a worker spots one that doesn’t work, or, as residents of 96th St. in Manhattan found out, a citizen calls the local utility to report the outage.
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