Techno-economic Assessment of Traffic-Adaptive Smart Lighting Projects

Rapid population growth in cities results in an increased energy consumption and need for infrastructure development. Street lights are some of the common energy consuming infrastructure in cities. Energy efficiency and demand-side management (EEDSM) interventions are therefore required to lower emissions and energy intensity in cities as well as save costs. The upgrading of infrastructure to include internet-of-things technologies as cities transition towards ‘smart cities’ presents opportunities to save energy via retrofitting old street light technology with smart lights. This work presents a methodology for techno-economic analysis of evaluating smart lighting retrofit projects that use traffic-adaptive control. The proposed analysis uses a lamp failure rate model to conduct a techno-economic analysis of street lights in a case-study city in South Africa. The resulting payback period for the smart lights retrofit is 3.42 years. The methodology proposed in this paper is more comprehensive than current alternatives in literature; it incorporates the time-value of money, makes use of lighting simulation studies and offers more accurate calculations of maintenance costs.