Philips Lighting Chooses Echelon's Technology for New Generation of Energy-Efficient Street Lighting
Solution Uses 40% Less Energy and Reduces Environmental Impact
Echelon Corporation (NASDAQ: ELON) recently announced that Philips Lighting, one of the world's leading providers of lighting systems, has built its new Starsense street light telemanagement system using Echelon's LonWorks® platform. Using Echelon's power line transceivers to communicate between lighting fixtures and Echelon's i.LON®
SmartServer to provide Internet access and local monitoring and control, Starsense can deliver energy savings of over 40 percent, reducing cities' energy bills and carbon footprint. The announcement was made today at the 2008 Light+Building event in Frankfurt, Germany, the world's largest tradeshow dedicated to the lighting industry.
"Philips today highlighted the very significant energy savings and CO2 reductions to be gained from a new generation of innovative lighting technology. These opportunities address some of the fundamental issues we face today—such as energy consumption, global climate change, and the need to improve European competitiveness. Today, energy efficient lighting is required in all sectors, including city streetlights, and our Starsense system meets this need," said Gil Soto Tolosa, European product marketing manager for road lighting at Philips Lighting. "We built our Starsense system on Echelon's platform because Echelon has a proven history of providing innovative, reliable products that let us build market-leading functionality into our systems. Working with Echelon, we believe we have created a future-proof solution that offers a significant improvement in functionality that also costs less to install and maintain."
Streetlight systems are expensive for cities to operate and maintain. They also use a lot of energy—representing almost 40 percent of a typical city's electricity spending. Starsense uses Echelon's power line technology to reduce installation and deployment costs, turning the existing power lines running to each light pole into a reliable communications network. And, leveraging the new user-programmability feature of Echelon's i.LON Smart Server, Philips has added its know-how into the system to save even more energy and reduce commissioning and operating costs.
The savings potential for such a system is significant. The ability to remotely adjust light levels based on time, traffic, weather, and other factors can dramatically reduce energy consumption saving cities money and helping them meet their Kyoto commitments for CO2 emission reductions. Analysts have estimated (click for PDF report), for example, that the New York City metropolitan area could save over 275,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions annually, or the equivalent of removing 50,677 cars from the road by switching to an energy efficient streetlight system.
"We are pleased that Philips has built its new energy saving streetlight solution using our LonWorks products and platform," said Anders Axelsson, Echelon's senior vice president of sales and marketing. "By adopting LonWorks based smart street lighting solutions, cities worldwide could save millions of tons of CO2 emissions annually. As energy costs continue to rise and as cities look for ways to take action to both curb their costs and reduce their carbon emissions, we believe products like the new Starsense system will play an important and growing role."
For more information, visit www.echelon.com.
About Starsense
Philips's Starsense solution uses Echelon's power line communications technology in each streetlight in its new OLC (Outdoor Luminaire Controller). Data from the streetlights is collected by the Starsense Segment Controller (based on Echelon's i.LON SmartServer, with its unique power line repeating function that seeks out and utilizes the best communications path to ensure reliability). The Starsense Segment controller manages the streetlights and communicates with a city's monitoring center equipped with Starsense Supervisor Web portal software (powered by Streetlight.Vision). The software aggregates millions of data from the streetlights and other devices and provides the end user with a comprehensive package of Web management applications, including energy consumption analysis, automatic failure identification, preventive maintenance and remote testing and monitoring of streetlights on city maps.About Royal Philips Electronics
Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) is a global leader in healthcare, lifestyle and technology, delivering products, services and solutions through the brand promise of "sense and simplicity". Headquartered in the Netherlands, Philips employs approximately 124,300 employees in more than 60 countries worldwide. With sales of EUR 27 billion in 2006, the company is a market leader in medical diagnostic imaging and patient monitoring systems, energy efficient lighting solutions, personal care and home appliances, as well as consumer electronics.About Echelon Corporation
Echelon Corporation (NASDAQ: ELON) is a networking company that provides products and systems that can monitor and save energy; lower costs; improve productivity; and enhance service, quality, safety, and convenience by connecting everyday devices in utility, buildings, industrial, transportation, and home control systems. Tens of millions of smart devices based on Echelon's LonWorks® products and Networked Energy Services (NES) systems are used around the world today, bringing benefits to consumers and industry.# # #
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