Intelligent street lighting is recognized by many city leaders as a first step toward the development of a smart city and can help cities increase energy efficiency, raise additional revenue, keep residents safe, improve sustainability, and attract new residents and businesses.

In addition to reducing energy costs and carbon emissions, an intelligent lighting network can provide a city-wide platform for adopting innovative smart applications, including traffic management, smart parking, environmental monitoring, extended Wi-Fi communications, as well as efficiently illuminating public spaces for added safety.

The city of Chicago is undertaking one of the largest street lighting modernization programs in the country and plans to replace 270,000 city lights over the next four years with LEDs and intelligent controls, which could eventually save the city $10 million in annual energy costs.

Navigant Research expects 73 million connected street lights to be deployed globally by 2026. The latest edition of Smart City Tracker includes smart city projects in 221 cities, a quarter of which are deploying smart street lighting that span hundreds of thousands of lights. While this is by no means a complete list of street lighting projects, it indicates the growing momentum behind the deployment of intelligent networked city lighting solutions.

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