Echelon Corp. is expanding its deployment of white tunable connected street lighting in White Bear Lake, MN, to include weather-adaptive capabilities powered by its collaboration with IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT). Echelon is deploying the weather-adaptive solution alongside the white tuning solution recently implemented at the city’s Railroad Park. Combining the two advanced adaptive control capabilities enables city managers to take advantage of smart controls that adjust park lighting based on real-time weather data as well as activity levels or time of day. For example, lights can be pre-programmed to adapt automatically to real-time weather changes according to predefined preferences, such as a brighter level and a warmer color during a snow storm to minimize glare or a cooler, bluer color during thunder storms to improve visibility. Research suggests that this bluer color, which blocks the release of sleep-inducing melatonin, is ideal for creating greater alertness under adverse weather conditions.
“Adding the weather adaptive capability to the newly deployed white tuning proof of concept in White Bear Lake was a natural progression,” notes Ken Taillon, manager of municipal lighting services, Short Elliott Hendrickson Inc., who led the project engineering. The combined solutions can set color and light level scenes based on a pre-programmed schedule, sensor inputs, weather data or manual adjustment.