Technical Report, Draft #1

1 Introduction

With the rising concern of increasing energy consumption,  the Energy Market Authority is tackling by reviewing new ideas and solutions. Currently, enormous electrical energy is consumed by streetlights which are controlled by the means of the time of the day. One of the challenges face is due to the inadequate lighting control and poor power efficiency by streetlights which involves a great amount of energy wastage and plays a part in electricity costs.

With the development of urbanisation, the usage of street lamps increases rapidly in due to high traffic and human population density. On the other hand, these streetlights must be adequately illuminated to provide sufficient visibility for the safety of pedestrians and vehicles. However, these street lamps are illuminated constantly for 12 hours from a timing of 7pm to 7am. This results in a need of huge amount of electrical power to light them up. According to the article,” Singapore Energy Statistics,” (2015) there is an increment of electricity consumption which grew up by 2.4% to 48 TWh in 2015. This shows how much the spending cost of electricity is high.

We know that in some time of the night for some roads, vehicles motion happens at a very small rate in a specific period of time. We can also find streetlights in some roads with either no pedestrian movement or vehicles are still illuminated and consuming electrical power. This is a problem that means that some part of the roads is free and be occupied again.

That raises a question: is it be possible to automatically reduce the electricity usage for certain part of the roads that do not have any pedestrians and vehicles and be illuminated once there is movement on these parts of the road?

By implementing such a system, it can help to save a large amount of electrical power.

However, it is difficult to track the presence of vehicles in any part of the road. In addition, it has to be known when some vehicles are going to pass by in order to decide on increasing in the intensity of the streetlights. Technologies like using cameras to count the number of vehicles and pedestrians are not feasible because they require external hardware such as computers to monitor the vehicle and pedestrians count. Therefore, there is a need for a system that reacts automatically and controls the intensity of the light based on the presence of people and vehicles.

2 Problem Statement

The streetlights in SIT should aim to provide sufficient lighting for both road users as well as pedestrians. These lights should also be energy efficient.

Currently, streetlights in SIT use conventional street lights that constantly illuminate its surrounding, leading to a high electrical usage.The inefficiency of the streetlights contributes to a significant amount of the total electricity expenditure in SIT. Moreover, electricity consumption of streetlights is likely to increase over the years as a prediction shows an inclining trend for demand and price for electricity.

Considering the problems of conventional lighting methods, it has turned out to be essential to install a new lighting system that is both efficient and cost-effective.

3 Purpose Statement

The purpose of the report is to propose an alternative solution for the financial state of SIT to save electricity. By implementing an intelligent lighting system that uses motion sensors to detect the number of people around the area, the lights will emit the necessary lighting levels to save energy. Additionally, the report aims to present an overview of a greener solution to street lighting.