LED street light pilot

During an LFI press conference at LFI, GE Lighting made bold claims about it work with the City of Los Angeles and the GE LightGird technology that presumably will place network connectivity and a GPS receiver on every street light fixture. While energy efficiency is part of the story, GE insisted that automated maintenance that will eliminate outages is the key reason that Los Angeles may install the system on a broad basis.Full details of the system aren’t available and GE won’t formally announce it until later this year. But Los Angeles has already conducted a trial and is moving to implement and extended pilot program. The wireless nodes will be installed in the NEMA socket where photocells are typically installed. Networked lights will communicate to gateways that serve many lights. Previously Los Angeles had installed the Acuity Roam network system in at least pilot projects. GE Lighting executives wouldn't explicitly say whether their technology was displacing Roam. But Jaime Irick, GE general manager of North America professional solutions, said that commissioning lights on the GE system takes less than a minute whereas other technologies that Los Angeles had tested could take 45 minutes.A quote attributed to Ed Ebrahimian, director of the Bureau of Street Lighting for Los Angeles, seemingly confirmed the win for GE. "The City of Los Angeles has led the nation in the installation of energy-efficient LED light fixtures and remote monitoring units," said Ed Ebrahimian, director, Bureau of Street Lighting, City of Los Angeles. "Based on our latest evaluation of remote monitoring and control technologies, we are proceeding with a large scale pilot installation and evaluation of the GE system."