Urbanova Reaches Milestone with Smart and Connected Streetlights Pilot

Pilot Aims to Increase Energy Efficiency and Public Safety, and
Garner Insights into Air Quality

SPOKANE, Wash.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#EnergyEfficiency–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™ Internet of Things (IoT) 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.

To learn more about the Smart and Connected Streetlights Pilot, visit https://urbanova.org/projects.

Quotes

“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

About Urbanova

Urbanova is a living laboratory to design cities for the future. Located
in the University District near downtown Spokane, Washington, we harness
data to gain insights, empower people and solve urban challenges in new
ways. We enable healthier citizens, safer neighborhoods, smarter
infrastructure, a more sustainable environment and a stronger economy.
Urbanova was founded by Avista, the City of Spokane, Itron, Washington
State University, McKinstry and the University District Development
Association.

Interested in learning more? Join us. We’d like to continue the
conversation. Visit www.urbanova.org.

Contacts

Itron, Inc.
Alison Mallahan, 509-891-3802
Senior Public
Relations Specialist
alison.mallahan@itron.com
or
Avista
Debbie
Simock, 509-495-8031
Senior Communications Manager
debbie.simock@avistacorp.com
or
Washington
State University
Tina Hilding, 509-335-5095
Communications
Director, Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture
thilding@wsu.edu