In order to handle and curb the power wastage, a team of students from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M) has developed an intelligent lighting system that makes sure that the street-lights take full effect only on sensing vehicular movement. And when the road is empty, the lights go dim by 30 per cent.
According to Sushant Uttam Wadavkar a second-year mechanical engineering student, it is a fully automated lighting system, which was recently granted provisional patent for offering novel features. In the Chennai context, the city corporation drains 331.32 mega watts of electricity spending `52.08 crore per year on street-lighting, of which an estimated 30-40% goes waste. The Greater Chennai Corporation maintains 2,77,902 street-lights, of which 1,71,229 are energy-saving LED lights.
The first-of-its-kind system developed in India. “We can easily save over 40% of power though this intelligent lighting system, which is compact, cost-effective and easy to maintain. This is possible as people won’t be using the streets for all 12 hours at night and street-lights need not be at maximum brightness during all these times. Our basic principle is to save energy and costs by dimming the street-lights when they are not in use,” he said.
“We are planning to approach the State government under the vision of Smart City for the next-step implementation of the product. The overall manufacturing cost of the outdoor system comes to around `2,000 to `2,200 and the cost can be recovered in three years and the life-span of the product is 15 years,” they said.
The student team has been mentored by two IIT-M professors, N Arunachalam and Lakshminarasamma N.
