Shaping the sustainable cities of the future with smart street lighting

One of the UK’s largest privately-owned property companies, IM Properties owns and manages Blythe Valley Park, a circa 900,000 square feet mixed-use business park on the outskirts of Birmingham, the UK’s second largest city.

IM Properties is responsible for providing a number of shared assets such as street lights and CCTV cameras around the park, which is home to 33 businesses that together employ around 3,500 people in the commercial, industrial, leisure and residential sectors.

As part of its vision to make Blythe Valley a safer, smarter business environment that is an exemplar of sustainable best practice, IM Properties sought a new energy-saving street light solution that would lower emissions, reduce costs and increase the park’s overall energy efficiency.

The existing 67 street lights along the park’s roads were consuming a lot of energy with their 250w lamps, so Enzen was appointed to provide a greener infrastructure alternative that would support the park’s sustainable development and decarbonisation goals.

In collaboration with Enzen group companies Wellness TechGroup and NNNCo, our knowledge practitioners designed and implemented the innovative ZenLumen Smart Street Lighting solution.

ZenLumen enables users to monitor and control their lighting infrastructure, detect real-time energy consumption and operational irregularities within their systems.

Despite the supply chain challenges of lockdown, Enzen installed 67 new street luminaires – with 138w LED lamps featuring surface mounted diodes – on 10-metre columns across the park over the course of 10 days during the summer of 2020.

Each luminaire can be automatically switched on, off or dimmed individually or zonally depending on the customer’s needs or according to profiles. This enables the park’s managers to reduce energy waste and light pollution, in contrast to the previous lighting system where everything was under a single control regime.

ZenLumen uses NNNCo’s Low Power Wide Area Network technology to connect smart controllers to each luminaire column via the cloud. The overall system is managed via Wellness’s WeLight software, a smart lighting platform designed to improve the effectiveness and reliability of public lighting systems.

Upon completion of the project, Enzen conducted an energy saving analysis of the system on an operational like-for-like basis with the previous lighting. This showed a potential reduction of 46% in energy use over the course of a year, with further savings to be gained from targeted dimming of each luminaire at appropriate times.

Enzen’s solution has improved the quality and efficiency of the park’s lighting infrastructure, and in turn supported IM Properties’ wider ambition to create a greener environment for the park’s occupiers and a sustainable best-in-class development.

As the UK aims for net zero by 2050, ZenLumen demonstrates how smart solutions can play a critical role in delivering the country’s energy transition, enabling communities and cities to enjoy greener, more affordable and more sustainable power than ever before.