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Street Light Working Group Update

CleanTECH San Diego’s Marty Turock represented both the City of San Diego and the San Diego Region Street Light Working Group in a recent presentation at the California Street Light Association (CAL-SLA) Annual Southern California Meeting, which was held at their LA County offices. Turock presented an overview of the City of San Diego’s progress in implementing one of the first adaptive-controlled LED street light networks in downtown San Diego and shared insights into the city’s vision for transforming this intelligent street light network into a multi-functional smart city infrastructure platform.

Adding to this initiative, the City of San Diego and CleanTECH San Diego conducted two meetings with SDG&E to further define the requirements and the interim energy data reporting format and collection model to support the development of a future metered billing rate for street lights which will enable monetization of the advanced application functionalities. As none of SDG&E’s existing metered tariff rates are currently as attractive as the city’s current LS-2 non-metered rate, SDG&E will be moving forward with an advice letter to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to approve an interim “LS-2 dimmed rate” so that those municipalities that install the adaptive controls will be able to monetize the benefits of selective dimming while the joint project team continues to work toward the ultimate goal.

CleanTECH San Diego partnered with the Bay Area Climate Collaborative in submitting a “North/South” application for one of the CEC’s EPIC grants. The “Advanced Multi-Function Street Light Control Systems and Smart City Networks” project is expected to include pilot projects with both the City of San Diego and City of San Jose evaluating next generation controls, communications, and sensor technologies from major lighting suppliers, Qualcomm, and some interesting start-up companies. It is intended that these pilots would be coordinated with SDG&E and PG&E, as well as the Department of Energy’s Municipal Solid State Lighting Consortium to foster shared learnings and best practice adoption.