Rongwen and Silver Spring team up on Chinese smart light network

Technology firms Rongwen and Silver Spring Networks have teamed up to connect more than 30,000 smart lights in China’s third largest city.

At Smart City Expo World Congress, held in Barcelona earlier this month, China-based intelligent street lighting company Rongwen and San Jose, California-based IoT connectivity specialist Silver Spring Networks unveiled plans to roll out a network of smart LED street lights in the Chinese city of Guangzhou.

Guangzhou is China’s third largest city after Beijing and Shanghai and has a population of over 14 million people. It is also China’s third largest economic hub and a major foreign trade port, and has committed to reducing its carbon emissions up to 45 percent by the end of the decade.

In this project, Rongwen will combine its patented LED street lights and outdoor lighting controls with Silver Spring’s StreetLight.Vision (SLV) central management system for smart lighting. The companies claim that this will boost the city’s energy savings by over 70 percent.

Reducing carbon emissions

Data compiled by China’s National Bureau of Statistics shows that streetlights in China more than doubled over the decade from 2004 to 2014, from 10.53 million to 23.02 million. In recent years, lighting energy consumption in China amounted to 14 percent of total energy consumption, with streetlights and landscape lighting energy consumption making up 38 percent of the total. Many are still based on high-pressure sodium bulbs, which consume a lot of energy, so replacing these with LED technologies is a step in the right direction.

According to Zhixiong Lee, general manager of Rongwen, the combination of the company’s technology with that from partner Silver Spring will help city officials in Guangzhou better manage resources and reduce overall carbon emissions.

“Rongwen is using Silver Spring’s pioneering smart city platform to provide seamless IoT connectivity to more efficiently operate existing city-wide resources to achieve immediate cost savings and speed time to value for smart city initiatives,” he said.

“We believe that the scalability and sustainability of this system will allow cities such as Guangzhou to grow their network to millions of devices in the future.”

Investing in smart city tech

Jeff Ross, vice president of channel at Silver Spring Networks, added: “Guangzhou is an example of a major hub deploying an IoT network to drive sustainability, create resource efficiency and build a more livable city, which in turn draws in new investments.

“We are thrilled to connect smart city devices in our first project in China, as Rongwen deploys our standards-based platform to connect street lights and establish a foundation for additional smart city services for the Guangzhou Development Zone.”

“By working with our partners, we continue to evolve our standards-based platform’s capabilities, in an effort to address our cities’ biggest challenges, such as traffic congestion, pollution and public safety.”