Urbanova, a smart city living lab in Spokane, Washington’s University District, has reached a key milestone with its Smart and Connected Streetlights Pilot, installing sensors on and collecting data from 10 streetlights across the district. Urbanova founding partner Avista will install an additional 29 LED fixtures with dimming capabilities in the fall. With the pilot, Urbanova is defining how to develop and design a living laboratory and harnessing data to gain insights, empower people and solve urban challenges in new ways.

With the goal of increasing energy efficiency and public safety, the pilot enables the intelligent management and control of the streetlights using Itron’s OpenWay® Riva solution. The smart, connected sensor network provides the foundation for the streetlight pilot and future applications. The new generation streetlights not only save energy compared to predecessors, but they are also remotely controllable so that lighting conditions can be adjusted and optimized to improve public safety or urban ambiance.

The pilot also features a human-scale urban air quality R&D component, measuring the quality of the air and other environmental factors to assess air quality’s role in a healthy city. The streetlights are capturing other data, including ambient temperature, ambient light, peak noise level, motion detection and pole orientation.

The data will provide insights into energy savings and efficiency and will be used with advanced weather and air quality models to improve understanding of micro-climates in urban areas. It will also provide unique and valuable information about how forest fires – which are common in the region – affect air quality and pollution in urban environments.

The Smart and Connected Streetlights Pilot plays a key role in helping Urbanova establish a data governance model and a shared platform architecture. The organization is discussing questions about data ownership, control and sharing. All six founding partners have access to the shared data that comes from the sensors to use for research, baseline data, visualization or business case development.

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“This milestone represents one of Urbanova’s several accomplishments under its 2016 Envision America selection. We’ve been very deliberate about how we design our partnership as well as how we prototype the supporting technical platform. We are developing Urbanova to be a community of learning for healthy cities, and we are looking forward to bringing additional partners into our collaboration.” – Kim Zentz, director, Urbanova and co-director, Washington State University smart cities initiative

“It’s an exciting time to be involved in the energy industry with new technologies continuing to change the energy landscape. With the Smart and Connected Streetlights Pilot, Urbanova is demonstrating the value of a collaborative approach to smart city solutions and IoT technologies. Avista is proud to be a founding partners of Urbanova and involved in this project that will serve as an example of how to execute future collaborative smart city projects.” – Heather Rosentrater, Avista vice president of energy delivery

“Smart street lighting is a great entry point into creating a smart city. As a proving ground, Urbanova is taking it a step further by sharing data across partner organizations to see what’s possible and then sharing what we’ve learned with other cities. This open, collaborative environment is at the core of Itron’s vision for our OpenWay Riva IoT solution, which is the foundation for the Smart and Connected Streetlight Pilot and future pilots to come.” – Sharelynn Moore, vice president of global marketing and public affairs at Itron

“As we are making Spokane safer, smarter and healthier, it’s organizations like Urbanova that set us apart. The capabilities and insights that will be gained from the Smart and Connected Streetlight Project will help improve the community for our citizens and enable us to share what we learn with our colleagues in other cities.” –David Condon, mayor, City of Spokane

“This project is particularly important and exciting because Spokane is one of hundreds of similar mid-sized cities in the U.S. that have rarely been studied for air pollution. The data gathered by the Smart and Connected Streetlight pilot will provide us with valuable insights into the links between air quality and health in our communities and will provide a template for deploying and operating sensor networks within comparable cities across the U.S.” – Von Walden, professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Washington State University

Click here for PDF of press release.