Kashmir’s First Smart Street Lights Project in Srinagar with SmarDen & KPar
Home automation technology can be a huge contributor to our campaign to save energy and do our bit for the planet. The technology provides more than one way to be energy efficient while not being a burden on the environment and your pocket at the same time.
The Indian government is warming up to the idea of smart cities in India. With the progressive approach and the right mindset to attain better, we are coming up with reliable and energy-efficient ways to conserve electricity. The government is now teaming up with various companies with the same motto to make India smart and have a better future.
A similar opportunity presented itself and we grabbed it. KPar and SmarDen teamed up and presented a proposal for Smart Street Light Automation for the existing stretch of street lights. The proposal was the demonstrate the use of the technology of the Internet of Things and how it can be used to save power and resources.
Project Proposal: The conversion of existing street lights into smart Street Lights with our smart Street light control panel and IoT Dashboard at M A Road, Srinagar.
Understanding of the current architecture: The Complete stretch of M A Road, has a total of 80 poles that are having 2 street lights on each pole. Hence the total number of street lights in the complete stretch is 160. This complete stretch is operated from 2 substations and we planned to deploy the pilot project on one substation.
Here is the architecture for each substation. Since there is a total of 2 substations, the total load is divided into 2 parts and according to this one substation is responsible for approx. 30 Poles of Street light. All the poles have two arms i.e. there is a total of 2 lights on a single pole and one substation is handling over 60 Lights approx.
We used our smart Street Light Control Panel to convert the existing stretch of street lights into smart street lights.
At the output of each circuit breaker, we installed our devices and then with the help of KPar or SmarDen mobile application or our Smart Dashboard, we’ve configured the devices with our cloud-based IoT Platform. The Smart Street Light control panel works on a GSM Sim card, so we used a BSNL Sim with our device that provides the necessary internet connection.
Demonstration of Smart Street Lights
How are these Smart Street Lights helping the Indian Government?
The Internet of Things technology is used in automation projects, which states that the normal things around us can be connected to the internet and they can communicate with each other and we as users can interact with them, control them and monitor them with our smartphones from anywhere in the world. Now because these smart devices are integrated in this way, your trip to manually go and check the street lights or to turn them on and off is saved. The operators can remotely control the street lights from their homes. Moreover, there are lots and lots of features which help them in taking control over the system in a better way.
Scheduling: The Street lights can be scheduled to turn on/off at a particular time of the day or night and these schedules can be modified with the Smart Phone application or the Smart Dashboard.
Timers: The operators can also use an auto-off timer to control the devices, after a certain amount of time entered by the user, the light will automatically turn off.
Multi-user access: There are multiple operators across the different locations, with the help of our mobile application and a smart dashboard we can provide access to multiple users.
Check History: There is a feature that lets the user watch the complete history of the device to track the toggle actions. It will show the user who was controlling or toggling the device at a particular time.
Live Power Tracking: The App and the Dashboard provides a feature that lets the user see the live power consumption by the street lights, it will give the live feed and the user can check the power consumption throughout the different times of the day.
Live Energy Reports: The Dashboard also shows the data about the energy consumptions and the user can check the data related to any point of time in the day. Since we’re storing this data, this makes it easy for the user to check the energy consumption report on any specific day of any month from the last 3 months.
Live Power Parameters: With the dashboard, the user can see the live power parameters such as the phase voltage in each phase, the current in each phase, the power factor in each phase. This makes it very easy for the user to track the fault and take necessary actions.
Our Journey in Smart City Srinagar
The overall idea of converting the street lights to smart street lights started from the SSCL (Srinagar Smart City Ltd.) office, when we were giving the presentation for these IoT based devices to IAS Athar Amir Khan (Commissioner of Srinagar Municipal Corporation and CEO of SSCL) really liked the idea of integration of these devices to the existing architecture to make it smart without replacing the existing structure.
Being a man of action, he immediately agreed to the pilot run and gave permission to the project. With the corporation of SSCL, SMC and KPDCL. We finally executed the project and gave a demonstration of the project to the Commissioner, Joint Commissioner, SHO, Superintendent Engineer, Executive Engineer, AEE and JE.
We also got recognition from the Srinagar media and got a Satisfactory certificate from Srinagar Municipal Corporation and Kashmir Power Development Corporation Limited. This was a huge thing for us because we started selling our home automation products in Delhi NCR and now we have a live project in Srinagar!
With the success of the pilot project, we’re looking forward to contributing more towards building Srinagar into a Smart City.
