When our working day or leisure time comes to an end and night falls, we feel safe and at ease beneath the artificial lighting that illuminates our roads and streets. That is when it is hard to imagine what our lives would be like after sunset without this basic service. We probably do not even realise that this service is a fairly recent innovation and has only formed part of city life for about a couple of centuries – and just a few decades in many rural regions of Spain.
In truth, lighting is more than a service: it provides a basis for the evolutionary development that accompanies the growth of cities and the social interaction of its environments. An evolution on demand.
Thanks to artificial light, in its myriad forms and technologies, we can extend our working days, increasing our productivity beyond daylight hours; improve the security of both people and possessions; enjoy our leisure activities, enhance an extended nightlife; highlight the beauty of our cities and monuments, and so on.
It is only when we experience the absence of street lighting that we realise how extraordinarily important it is for urban societies, the tremendous impact it makes through its existence and the sense of isolation and helplessness felt by the urban human without it.
Street lighting will be no exception and after decades with barely a change, in a few years we have seen an explosion of electronics into lighting fixtures, followed by the radical transformation of the light source to LED, the emergence of dimmable and latterly programmable devices and now connectivity and remote management.
We believe that this ongoing transition is here to stay and that by simply incorporating intelligence and connectivity into our lighting fixtures we will be able to update their features and functions in line with the needs of each moment and have the technological availability to achieve this.
When we think about it, why is lighting often not given the importance it merits, abandoning technical and quality criteria in an effort to prioritise costs savings when purchasing new material? More importantly, why are technical studies not considered before embarking on a project, which analyse the deficiencies to be rectified or the actual demand for the service to be covered in each case, taking into account the changing needs the future holds.
In short, urban lighting already does many things for us, however as the 21st Century begins and thanks to technology, it is ready to offer us much more.
Lighting technology is evolving at high speed, offering us the possibility of going far beyond the simple ability to see and be seen. It allows us to look at and appreciate our entire urban environment, interacting with it to improve our experience, enhancing our levels of comfort and security without having a direct impact on our domestic economy.
New lighting helps us cohabit in a more sustainable environment, accentuating the darkness of the night sky so that we can appreciate its immensity as it envelopes our planet, constantly adapting to the continuous transformations we experience every day.
And adaptability is the key to everything. Today, thanks to technological advances in light generation and control as well as in the acquisition, transmission and processing of information, the lighting industry is already set to provide residents with street lighting that is not only much more efficient and of a higher quality, but is also a facility that can be modelled according to demand, thereby offering a response with a difference.
This adaptability is achieved through connectivity and the handling of data originating not only from the lighting installation, but also from other urban services or the residents themselves, thanks to their interaction with the installation.
This new lighting is already a reality and we will see its deployment grow over the coming years, driven by heightened awareness of energy and environmental sustainability as well as by the increased needs of the people for individual solutions to diverse demands and problems.
As a result, the EU is supporting trends that go way beyond mere energy efficiency, paving the way for Human Centric Lighting. This is a lighting concept that focuses on the human being and which always adjusts to the needs of the individual with the aim of achieving enhanced performance and well-being for its users.
These new EU directives go hand in hand with a funding policy to renew lighting installations, such as the support provided by the IDAE, the Institute for Energy Diversification and Saving, that awards funding for the renewal of street lighting.
Public incentives apart, we must not forget that our objective as an industry and the aim of the public and private managers of the lighting service must be a commitment to quality, reliability, energy and economic efficiency and, above all, focus on the citizen and their needs when planning and implementing a lighting project.
If we look ahead in line with the EU’s vision, we already have to think well beyond issues that solely relate to lighting to see that the world towards which we are heading is going to be dominated by sensorisation, digitalisation, the handling of data and its exchange in the cloud within the environment or ecosystem of the Internet of Things, where a large quantity of objects are interconnected. Within this not-so-futurist scenario, lighting in general and street lighting in particular, will play a prominent role by providing a suitable platform for the acquisition (sensors) of data, their transmission (communications networks), as well as their interaction with individuals and objects (applications and functionalities).
To prepare ourselves for this imminent future, we have to decide which technological solutions should be incorporated into our municipal districts that not only respond to the demands of today but are also able to cover those of tomorrow. We should remember that technological transformations are taking place at an even greater speed and impact on every environment.
We are shifting towards a concept in which the lighting fixture is a services node, one of which the most fundamental is street lighting. However it is not the only service and we have to be prepared not only for what street lighting is going to do for us today but also for what it could offer us tomorrow.
Arturo Rubio, Business Development Manager – Smart Systems Division
