Sunshine Coast rolls out Telensa smart lighting

Sunshine Coast Council has selected Telensa to implement smart street lighting for a two-year pilot.

The PLANet intelligent street lighting system will be rolled out in the Maroochydore City Centre development, and in nearby Evans Street.

Telensa PLANet is an end-to-end smart street lighting system, consisting of wireless nodes connecting individual lights, a dedicated wireless network owned by the city and a central management application. The system pays for itself in reduced energy and maintenance costs, improves quality of service through automatic fault reporting and has the capacity to turn streetlight poles into hubs for smart city sensors.

Sunshine Coast is one of the largest and fastest growing regional economies in Australia, and the Maroochydore City Centre development will create a new capital city for the region with smart technology embedded from the outset.

The Telensa pilot will demonstrate the social, environmental and financial benefits of adaptive street lighting. It will also show the potential for adding smart city sensors such as for air quality, traffic analytics and waste monitoring. The system is due to be deployed in September.

“By making our streetlights smart, Telensa will help us reduce costs and improve the street lighting experience, as well as providing a platform for smart sensor applications,” said Sunshine Coast Council’s Economic Development and Innovation Portfolio Councillor, Steve Robinson.

“This deployment is another example of the council’s commitment to intelligent infrastructure that delivers a safer, smarter and more efficient environment for our citizens.”

The CEO of SunCentral, the company overseeing design and delivery of the new Maroochydore City Centre, said the goal was to create a central business district (CBD) for the future that would remain cutting edge for many years to come.

“With no legacy infrastructure to remove or replace on the 53-hectare greenfield site, we have a unique opportunity to create a CBD with unprecedented communications and technological abilities,” SunCentral CEO John Knaggs said.

“We’re delighted to be working with Sunshine Coast Council to make street lighting in Maroochydore smarter and more efficient, with a system that will be responsive to citizens’ needs for decades to come,” said Will Gibson, Founder and Chief Commercial Officer at Telensa.

“We’re looking forward to working together on a new generation of low-cost smart sensor applications, enabled by the city’s lighting network.”

Image caption: Maroochydore City Centre.

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