Silver Spring illuminates local governments about the IPv6 street light

Smart-networks provider Silver Spring Networks has made a play for local-government authorities by partnering with French developer Streetlight.Vision for a 'smart city' environment that will utilise the expandability of the IPv6 protocol to create a city-wide network spanning all manner of non-traditional computing devices.

The partnership is targeted at public lighting, which according to the company can account for up to 40% of a local government's energy spending. By transitioning existing streetlight solutions towards networked systems that are actively controllable, Silver Spring estimates it can cut streetlight energy consumption by over 40% and lower overall system costs by 30%.

Silver Spring has been integral to smart-meter efforts in Victoria, where utilities have pursued an ambitious and well-advanced smart-meter rollout that's driving a information-hungry utility market. Silver Spring is working, here and elsewhere, to expand the smart-network concept into other areas.

The new platform will be initially tested with US energy provider Oklahoma Gas & Electric (OG&E). "This solution is the only technically effective answer we have seen to delivering the monitoring and control so critical to efficiently managing public lighting," OG&E managing director Ken Grant said in a statement.

Silver Spring has long feted OG&E as an example of proactive energy minimisation: Anil Gadre, executive vice president of products, recently told GTR that OG&E had saved US$320 million ($A307 million) by using smart-energy solutions to avoid the need to build two additional power plants. The company's smart-meter infrastructure has also eliminated the need for 500,000 truck rolls per year, since customers' power can be connected and disconnected remotely once a smart meter is installed.

"Now that everyone has their automatic metering infrastructure network in place, they're focused on doing more with it," Gadre said. "It's leading to more and more interesting solutions and answers in very industry, and the business cases that were built to deploy the networks are being met. We're past a tipping point, and now we're starting to bring out the more interesting value."

The foundation for the company's latest effort is a city-wide network in which street lights, parking meters, environmental sensors, infrastructure monitoring devices, traffic signals, smart energy meters and other increasingly-intelligent devices are gaining the ability to communicate with authorities and with each other.

Connecting so many devices is possible thanks to the slowly-emerging IPv6 protocol – an upgrade to the existing IPv4 addressing scheme that has been used on the Internet for decades, but is nearly saturated thanks to an explosion in mobile devices. IPv6 is being widely touted as an enabler for live infrastructure environments, known as the 'Internet of Things' or, in Silver Spring's parlance, the 'Everything Network'.

Streetlight.Vision's contribution to the partnership will bring its smart-lighting software to Silver Spring's underlying network. 

"Silver Spring's IPv6 city-wide network and industry-leading innovation will not only enable municipalities to save energy and increase outdoor lighting maintenance efficiency, Streetlight.Vision general manager Christophe Orceau, "but also enable a new generation of smart street applications not effectively served by legacy solutions." – David Braue