Imagine if a streetlamp knew you were coming. It could announce your arrival from a distance. If you were on a date, it could help set the mood. It could ring in the new year with dazzling effects, change color at will, even announce days in advance when its bulb was set to blow.
In fact, there is nothing
future-tense about this fantastical vision; in a handful of
municipalities in Europe, streetlights have become downright chatty.
The system is called Tvilight. It was invented by Dutch designer Chintan Shah while a student at Delft University of Technology
in the Netherlands. When flying overseas, he noticed streetlamps
lighting streets that, in the middle of the night, were empty and
desolate.
"I started researching,"
he says. "I wondered, why are they burning? How much does it cost? Is
this a problem? I discovered some amazing numbers."
Shah found that Europe
pays over €10 billion ($13 billion) a year powering streetlights, which
accounts for more than 40% of government energy bills.
This translates into 40
million tons of CO2 emissions annually -- enough to power 20 million
cars. His solution was to create an intelligent, "on-demand" lighting
system using wireless sensors. Streetlights only light up in the
presence of a person, bicycle or car, and remain dim the rest of the
time.
Shah has also developed
the technology to distinguish between people and smaller animals, like
cats and mice, so it would avoid lighting up unnecessarily.
"I thought, why should each citizen pay for street lights that aren't being used? We now have a solution for that."
Spurred on by his
professors, Shah entered the concept in a campus competition and won.
Delft handed over their facilities and gave him the financial backing to
create a demonstration on campus. Since then, Tvilight has been
implemented in four municipalities in Holland and one in Ireland, with
many more to come.
"We have enquiries from
Israel, Turkey, the United States, Australia, India and Japan. The
problem is not a lack of enquiries, it's the team's capacity to deliver
the solution worldwide," he says.
Shaw reckons the system
will slash energy costs and CO2 emissions by 80%, and maintenance by
another 50%, thanks to the integrated wireless sensor that allows lamps
to alert a central control center when it's time to be serviced.
Tvilight's primary
purpose is to conserve energy. But when CNN invited Dutch artist Daan
Roosegaarde to offer advice as a mentor for Shah, he pointed to the
technology's more artistic potential.
"How can we use the
technology to make environments more human? More sustainable? More
natural?" asks Roosegaarde. "We want to make it like it's your friend,
or it's an animal, or it does things you don't know about. It's not just
a machine with a feedback loop, but something that has its own
intelligence and is willing to negotiate, to hack you in the same way
you hack it."
So, for example, an ambulance or fire truck could communicate with the lamps to make them flicker red before they drive through
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