Washington DC’s smart city transformation will be powered by 75,000 InteliLight streetlight controllers from Romanian company Flashnet.

The $309m project will reduce energy use by more than half, improve equity of service, and extend wifi coverage in underserved neighbourhoods.

Today, the District of Columbia’s maintenance services department relies on its citizens to contact them to identify streetlight malfunctions. This is because the current urban lighting in Washington is based on older, high energy-consuming sodium lamps, and remote monitoring and control was not yet available. That is about to change.

The district’s vision for a smarter, safer and more energy efficient city has brought intelligent urban lighting to the attention of the city council, which recently approved a project to convert all the city’s street lights to energy-efficient LED technology with remote monitoring and control capabilities. The project plans to reduce the energy consumption by more than half, optimising maintenance operations and enabling safer, more connected communities.

Part of the implementation consortium, Engie is the design and construction contractor and Equans will be the lighting service provider for the next 15 years, with Flashnet a provider of smart lighting hardware, communications and software.

The LED streetlights will use InteliLight Nema smart street lighting controllers to provide individual lamp control and monitoring capabilities, citywide grid awareness, and real-time malfunction alerts. The software will manage the lighting, while using API connectivity to integrate with the existing maintenance and workforce management software.

Another essential part of the project, communication security is of paramount importance for the US capital. The implementation team decided to use pre-existing carrier-grade NB-IoT and LTE-M connectivity, with multi-operator cellular fallback to ensure redundancy and 15 years pre-paid connectivity to avoid adding up the operational fees.

The lighting grid will be powered even during the day, extending the lighting pole functionality: wifi routers can be mounted and powered directly from the grid, a fast and non-expensive way to extend smart-city applications throughout the city.

“The benefits of InteliLight connected street lighting extend beyond illumination, and we are proud to demonstrate our capabilities in Washington, DC,” said Lorand Mozes, CEO of Flashnet. “This is an important breakthrough for Flashnet in North America, laying the ground for citywide connected infrastructure and improving the lives of generations to come.”