Echelon, ITOCHU, and Mitsui Pilot Street Lighting Control Systems in Japan

Several leading Japanese cities are now piloting street lighting management systems based on technology from Echelon and two of Japan’s leading solution providers, ITOCHU Corporation and Mitsui.

Varun Nagaraj, senior vice president at Echelon, said: “The use of a standards-based control system allows the cities in Japan to manage life-cycle procurement costs by providing them with a choice of luminaires, an expense that is often more than 80% of the cost of the project.”  

The street lighting management systems being piloted are built on the open ISO/IEC 14908 standard and implemented using Echelon’s Power Line Communications (PLC) transceivers and segment controllers, notably Echelon’s new CPD3000 Outdoor Lighting Controllers.

In the city of Tsukuba, Echelon partner ITOCHU Corporation has installed the second phase of a pilot, in cooperation with major Japanese lighting device manufacturers Panasonic and Toshiba. 

ITOCHU, as Echelon’s master distributor in Japan, also collaborated with a new market entrant, Mitsui & Company, for two additional pilot sites: in the city of Higashi Matsushima, part of the earthquake-damaged region of Tohoku, and at the campus of Hiroshima City University in the city of Hiroshima.

The ISO 14908-based solution being deployed in the pilots supports a variety of luminaires, ranging from LEDs from Toshiba and GE to ceramic metal halide lights from GS Yuasa. These lighting systems using Echelon-based lighting control system offer numerous benefits, including:

• Compared to just using high-efficiency lamps, street light management systems further lower energy use and reduce the cost of operating the street light infrastructure.
• In Hiroshima, where rising Japanese electricity prices now rival high-cost Asia-Pacific locations such as Australia and the Philippines, the change-out of high-pressure sodium (HPS) lamps to dimmable LEDs is lowering per-lamp electricity consumption by more than 50%, or nearly 120Kg of CO₂ per year, and is expected to save approximately $240 per year per lamp. The use of the control system to set dimming schedules based on weather and traffic patterns delivers 20% to 30% more savings compared to just shifting from HPS to LED.
• Additionally, all the pilots involve the monitoring of lamps from a centralized city location – so failures can be identified and responded to quickly, thereby increasing public safety while reducing maintenance costs.

You might also like:

• ITOCHU’s website
• Mitsui’s website
• Echelon’s Power Line Communications webpage
• CPD3000 Outdoor Lighting Controllers webpage