The Evolution of Smart Streetlights – Digital CxO Podcast EP108

Hello, and welcome to the digital CXO podcast. I'm Amanda Razani, and with me today I am happy to have Dan Evans. He is the Senior Director of Smart Cities and Smart Lighting at Itron.

How are you doing today? I'm well, Amanda. Thanks for having me on.

Can you share a little bit about your background and then a little bit about Itron and what do y'all do? Sure. Yeah.

Um, so I'm based out here in California, in Silicon Valley. So as you can imagine, I popped around to a few technology companies. Uh, that's kind of my roots is around, uh, tech and, and networking.

Uh, so I've, I've, uh, done a few stints at companies that were introducing broadband internet to the home over cable infrastructure. That was back in the nineties. Uh, I've been at companies that build wireless telecommunication systems, not not the cellular, uh, phone, uh, type, but for more, uh, internet services providers.

Uh, and then I joined a company called Silverspring Networks, uh, in the late mid two thousands, which was really focused on the utility industry and, um, enabling communications and software for utilities to, uh, allow them to start deploying what was called smart meters at the time. So a, a an electricity meter that had a communications capability. Um, and then in 2018, I think Itron acquired silver springing networks, um, and Itron sort of segueing to sort of who we are, um, is a company that is, you know, largely focused on, uh, helping utilities and cities become more resourceful with the resources that they, uh, operate and, and and maintain.

So we work with utilities across all of, uh, um, the commodities, electricity, water, gas, um, as well as with cities, uh, in, in the cases where they manage those commodities. Or in my world, um, as managing the smart cities line of business, we look at some of the challenges that cities are facing today, um, and, and how we can, uh, address those. And, and we've kind of leveraged a lot of the core infrastructure that we've developed for that metering world into what became the smart lighting world, which we'll talk about a bit more today, and then taking it beyond lighting into some of these other use cases.

So it's been, you know, a a almost about 17 year stint within this space, uh, with the last 10 years really focused around smart cities. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing, and you're certainly the right person to speak with today.

Then, since our topic is about the evolution of smart street lighting, and we're hearing so much about smart cities these days, so, you know, streetlights are no longer about just illumination. They're becoming the nervous system of smart cities and collecting data, enabling services that were not possible a few years ago. So can you elaborate on that and what benefit are cities seeing?

Sure. Yeah. No, this, uh, this phenomenon, if you will, uh, started kind of in the 20 10, 20 12 timeframe.

Um, and cities and utilities, depending on where you are around, around the world, I, I did mention earlier, but Itron is a global company. So we see this phenomenon, uh, evolving in many places, uh, in, in utilities in North America and the US specifically, a lot of the streetlight infrastructure is owned by the utility. So there was a natural conversation that we were already working with those customers to take it to the next level.

And in the other parts of the world, that infrastructure tends to be owned by the cities, but either case, they were looking at older technology. So we're talking about the lamp technology. You know, a streetlight has evolved from a gas lamp, uh, fixture to, you know, something that was electrified and that electrical, uh, technology has evolved.

Um, and the, the phenomenon that we were, we caught up with was LED technology. So now it's everywhere, right? It's, it's in our phones, it's in our cars, it's in our homes.

Well, it's on our streets as well. So you may live in a town, uh, if you look outside at the streetlight, it has been changed in the last 10 years into an LED streetlight. Um, what you may not know is whether or not has a smart controller on top.

So for the same reasons we got into the smart metering space, um, it basically enables communication to that asset. And why do you need a communication to a smart streetlight? Um, it's because you can, uh, be more proactive in maintaining it.

So, um, you and I, we've all seen streetlights that are out, right? And, and you're wondering, okay, did somebody call that in? Has somebody reported that, uh, I'm not gonna bother, you know, a week later it's still out.

So, okay. Clearly nobody reported it. Let me report it.

So a a, a smart technology can be introduced there to, to sort of be the virtual citizen, and as soon as there's a problem on the streetlight, an alert will go back to the operator, whoever's responsible, and allows them to be more proactive in their, in their maintenance. So it makes us as citizens happy. The, uh, economics of the, of the city from a commercial perspective go up because people feel safe and the quality of life is high.

So, you know, the LEDs were coming in, which meant that whoever owned that light was gonna roll a truck to replace it. So, uh, our, our solution and, and we're not the only one who offers this, was when you go out and upgrade that light, add a smart control solution, because you probably will regret not having done that, um, in, in a few years. And now you, if you have to go back to that light, the economics of that, uh, just, just don't pencil out.

So that's kind of the benefits are, you know, you get the visibility, improve maintenance, you can also have an improvement on the energy consumption. So just by, by going from the older high pressure, sodium metal, metal halide streetlight technology to LED roughly gets you a 50% savings in energy. So that's good.

But we're encouraging our, our customers and our install base to not stop there, add the controller, because these streetlights actually have this dimming capability. So just like you have a dimmer switch in your home that can adjust the light level, now that functionality exists on a streetlight, why would you want to do that? Well, you could have situations where you've got traffic, the, the, the drops during the middle of the night, no one's on the street, so you can bring the lights down to still a safe level, so you're illuminating the ground, but you don't have to be bright a hundred percent.

So that can get you some more energy savings beyond just the LED. Um, so it's a combination of energy and, and maintenance cost savings that has really, um, driven this adoption of the smart lighting control solution that we've seen around the world. And we have about 4 million of those, uh, smart streetlights under management here at idr.

Yeah, so there are many aspects that are improved from it from a safety energy and cost. Um, so with that being said, are there other places that you could put this sort of smart technology besides street lamps? I just wonder how, how else can cities benefit from this type of technology?

Yeah, so I mean, the, the, the nice thing about a streetlight pole is in most parts of the world, it's energized all the time. There are some situations where it go, the energy goes away during the day and it comes back again at night. But, um, a lot of, uh, cities are looking at how do I leverage that asset for more than just this smart lighting solution, which, you know, is good in and of itself.

Um, so we have worked with, at Itron, we work, uh, with a, a, a host of, um, technology partners who bring, uh, their solutions and we look at how we can integrate their solution with ours. So in some cases, I'll give an example where you might want to monitor the air quality on the street level, you know, at a very granular level, um, more so than what you might have using sort of federal level or government run facilities that report on, on weather or air quality in and of itself. Um, those can be attached to the streetlight and powered by the streetlight 'cause you've got power there.

And then you can actually leverage the smart controller to pull data from the sensor and then push that data up into the cloud into the software that we manage, which provides now the city with a single pane of glass view of the solution that they've deployed. Um, and so more and more of these different use cases, again, tied to the challenges that the cities are facing, whether it's, you know, climate change, uh, traffic congestion, as cities are growing, um, you know, public safety of, of infrastructure, um, there's a number of different challenges. And we work with this partner ecosystem to bring together their solutions with ours so that the city sees this as a, an investment that they can leverage and build upon, right?

Starting again with the lighting and, and then adding more on there. Once you have that, now you've got, you know, you've got your lighting data, you've got data coming from a variety of different other sensors, whether it's traffic or, or air quality, then you can start bringing these data sets together and actually making some analytics at a minimum and saying, okay, interesting data. Let's do some reports or take action.

So, um, you know, for example, my, my, uh, mention earlier of the ability to dim lights, well, if you had a traffic monitor on that street or distributed on the main roads, then you would know definitively that your volumes are down. Or if there's an event all of a sudden in that part of town that normally doesn't happen, the sensors would detect your traffic levels are actually higher, so you, you shouldn't dim when you normally would. Right?

So it brings the data sets together. Um, similarly examples of, uh, I wanna manage my traffic congestion. Okay, well, as a result of managing that, maybe you deploy a smart parking solution to help people, you know, get to the parking spot as as fast as they can, gets some off the road, removes the, the congestion, but at the same time, you've got an air quality benefit too.

'cause your pollution from the vehicles has just dropped. Well, how do you know that unless you've got the data? So it's really bringing the data sets together in that kind of cohesive manner that our, you know, that we bring to our customers through our, our software platform called City Edge.

Yeah, and I can imagine by collecting that data, as you said, if there's an area of town that's more congested, um, over a period of time, they might know, okay, we might wanna have a few more police officers patrolling the area, you know, um, to help you make it more safe in that area. Exactly. Yeah.

I mean, public safety is one of the key domains that we look at, and that ranges from, you know, uh, areas where lighting isn't present, right? That presents a public safety sits, uh, uh, situation. You may have flooding, uh, so a roadway could get flooded for, you know, heavy rains, uh, and the, and the creek or the river has overflowed that causes, you know, a public safety issue if, if the city can't get their maintenance crews out there to close off the roadway.

So again, the technology has the ability to, to, to detect those situations and proactively get, uh, get the crews who need to be out there addressing that problem, uh, for the benefit of the citizens. And again, these are all use cases that the city will benefit from and, and help their city grow to the next level, which is a, is a challenge all all the cities around the world are facing. Yeah, and it sounds like from what you're telling me, with all this energy savings, uh, on the electricity side, I know that that the, the grid is a, a big issue for big cities.

So if they're trying to build out, or even smaller cities that are trying to build out, there's only so much, um, energy available, so that would provide more, Correct. Correct. And that's, that's, that's another area that Itron is spending a lot of our, uh, kind of research and investment is how is the, our customers, the utilities, uh, being challenged in new and different ways as more things are, are entering the grid scenario.

So electric vehicles is a big area where we're, we're looking at how to help our utility customers manage the load as more and more of those appear right in, in our, in our homes and businesses. And, and again, taking it to the city level, cities are electrifying their fleets. So all of these trucks I talked about, rolling to fix the problem on the street, on the streetlight, those are all moving to electric vehicles as well.

The buses that are being run in the infrastructure are moving to electric. So what happens at the end of the day when all those fleets come back to the corporate yard, they're all gonna plug in, and that's gonna create a huge demand onto the grid, which causes instability if the city, if the utility hasn't planned for that. So we offer solutions that can come in and help manage that load and, and, and supply balance, which the utilities ultimately have to be doing every day to make sure they're not having any outages or, or concerns with the, the power quality they're delivering.

So it is a challenge, um, that we at Itron are, are helping our utility customers address along with the other, the other big movement to renewable energies, right? So changing the type of energy, uh, supply from what might have been a, an oil or coal base power plant to a wind farm or a solar farm, which are, are great for the climate and, and the overall environmental impact, but they bring a challenge in their dependability, right? The clouds move in, solar, uh, output drops, the wind goes away while your wind farm is not producing anymore.

So again, this is a, a challenge that we're helping with our, our utility customers, uh, balance, uh, all of these different supply sources with the demand and helping manage the demand to match. Yeah, absolutely. So you would say that the environmental impact is far reaching?

It definitely is. And, and again, when, when we look at, uh, kind of the market here, uh, that is a point of overlap, the climate concerns and, uh, everybody has carbon footprint reduction goals. Itron has our, our own, uh, set of goals.

Uh, the utilities have theirs, the cities have theirs, um, and everybody wants to move in that direction, uh, a as well as sort of the other impacts to the, the environment, uh, that are out there. So, so utilities are being encouraged and moving, uh, uh, rapidly towards renewable. Um, but it does introduce some of those, those new challenges as, uh, as cities are growing and, and cities, uh, like the one I live here in, in the Bay area, you know, data centers are popping up everywhere, right?

And thank you ai, right? That brings, uh, all sorts of compute power that's needed. Um, which, you know, computers run on energy.

So as a data center is built, you know, I look at it and go, okay, well my local utility is now gonna have a challenge of feeding that data center. 'cause that's a 24 by seven demand, right? It, it's not like us when we go to sleep and the energy drops off, that data center runs 24 by seven.

Um, so they've gotta be able to, to have good visibility into their infrastructure to know, uh, how they deliver that without bringing instability into the grid. So for a city just trying to enter into the smart city space, what advice do you have for them? What, from your experience, what challenges do you see occur when trying to integrate some sort of smart city plan, and what advice can you give?

Yeah, no, that's a great question, Amanda. I would say, you know, it starts with understanding the problem you're trying to solve. And, you know, as we go and look at these surveys, there's a number of challenges that cities face.

Uh, and I think we we're, we're open and, and collaborate with the cities to, to, to identify what are the key challenges they have. Um, definitely look at, uh, solutions that have maybe a broader, uh, fit as far as, um, you, you may start with one application that addresses one challenge, but think a little bit holistically in a higher level. Um, and, and what I mean by that is, a city might have a street lighting department and they might have a water utility and they might have a, a transportation or traffic department.

What we typically see is those city departments operate in silos, you know, and there's not a lot of crosstalk that happens typically now you're up at the city manager or even mayor level, depending on the size of the town or city, where somebody's looking at this across the board and saying, okay, I have a fixed budget. How do I make the most of the bang for my buck? You know, when I make an investment choice, am I just solving the problem of the, of the lighting guy, or do I really wanna look at a solution that's gonna address something for this traffic, uh, person as well?

Um, so looking at sort of a more of a holistic and homogenous, uh, deployment of technology. And then when you get into the technology and, and the selection, you know, look at what's out there on the market, look for open standards, right? Um, it's are very important to be able to grow on top of technology, uh, rather than pick technology that might have a four or five year lifetime and then it's gone, or the company's out of business or, you know, those are sort of long-term decisions that they make.

Um, the other thing is, you know, you know, it's fine to start small, it's time, it's fine to start with a pilot, decide kind of, does this give you the data you need? Is it meeting your expectations? Um, because that is very useful and important when you go back to the city council or to your, you know, investors or whoever is funding to say, I want more money to do X, y, or Z and here's the data I got from the, the pilot I ran a year ago that shows that I'm, I'm on the right trajectory.

It's gonna give me the benefits, me and my citizens and, um, that my communities, the, the benefits that that we say it will. Um, so that that's sort of the trajectory and the journey that they should get on. When you think about the future of smart cities, do you have any ideas rolling around for new integrations or tools that you think would solve some kind of problem?

Wow. It, it's a very wide space is what I would say. Uh, Amanda, I've been doing it as I said, probably for the last 10 years.

And, and what we saw is that that lighting space really grew and it, and it popped, you know, let's sort of use those terms where we definitely saw an uptick. Um, we are still kinda looking at the market and saying, okay, where's the next big pop gonna come from? And there are a number of different use cases, uh, and, and challenges that we are, uh, that we are trying to address in collaboration with the cities.

Um, I think the, the key, and, and maybe I'm jumping a little bit on, on the AI bandwagon here, but AI is all based upon the data underneath, right? It's, it's applying logic, it's applying algorithms to data. And so, um, for us at Itron, I mean, that's sort of, that's kind of where we started with, with the metering space and the smart metering space, and then the lighting space.

It wasn't just to enable the connectivity, but it was to put software in place that was collecting data. And now you have the data, what do you do with it? You know, we often hear from customers and cities, okay, there's so much data, I don't know what to do with it, right?

So I think the next level is really, uh, uplifting data into an outcome. And, and, and, and looking at the analytics behind that, what is the challenge? What is the outcome you need?

And let's not get lost in the data. And I think, again, AI is just another way of saying, I'll give you the answer you need because I'm crunching all that data underneath. And then once you have that outcome, you can maybe making incremental improvements and optimizing your system.

Uh, and you know, there, there's a feedback loop. So the data will tell you, oh, that didn't work, or, yes, that did work, right? You got the outcome that you, that you needed.

Um, so it's, it's just that, again, the growing need for data, uh, the growing need for the analytics to then be layered on top of that and then delivering ultimately an outcome to the customer that they don't have to worry too much about all the, uh, the sausage making, as we would say underneath the hood. I just get what I need for the benefit of my customers. Okay.

Well, if there was one key takeaway you could give our audience today, what would that be? Don't be afraid of technology. I mean, the, the, uh, depending on where you live in the world, again, I live in Silicon Valley, so it's, it's almost a foreign concept to not know what tech is.

But, um, you know, having worked with large, you know, fortune 500 companies and, and, and who are in a space, maybe that doesn't move as quickly. Cities are the same, right? And there's an evolution of the staff, and I think the people part has a lot to do with it.

Um, and so as more and more people adopt technology, I think they should look at how they can leverage that for their infrastructure. So when we talk about smart cities, you know, it's, it's really about the city. It's about the, the, the, the delivery of the services that they deliver to you and me as citizens within that city, and looking at how technology can leverage that, optimize that, you know, get you more bang for your budget.

'cause the budgets are, you know, not going up, you know, they're usually going down. And this is where technology and automation can often come in and replace maybe a task that, um, uh, was costing you a lot more before. So that's the theme.

Whichever one of these smart city use cases, you know, is the next one that, that comes across as the big, the big winner. Um, it's all gonna be based around that. So, uh, I think that's the key message and the key takeaway about, um, uh, you know, not to be afraid of the technology adopted, and, you know, companies like Itron gonna help you navigate that journey from, from beginning to end.

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights with us today. My pleasure.

And thanks again for having me, Amanda. All right. And thanks to our audience, stay tuned.

There's more.