Silver Spring Networks goes after the smart city
Silver Spring Networks has earned a reputation as a leading smart grid networking infrastructure player. But as smart grid deployment slows and heads toward full U.S. market saturation by around 2020, the company should (and is) looking for new market opportunities.
So what could be next? Well it sounds like the company is dipping its toes into the smart city water.
From a siliconbeat.com report:
“The payback time for smart public lighting is legitimately in the no-brainer category,” said Eric Dresselhuys, SSNI’s globe-trotting Executive Vice President, in an interview from Barcelona. “Right now, street lights and traffic lights are managed with the kind of timer that you use when you go on vacation. Cities are eager to make themselves more liveable: they want to get more companies and people to live there. You’re seeing early pilots of smart parking meters, public lighting, traffic signals, and environmental monitoring like CO2 sensors.”
Silver Spring recently announced it has been chosen to network 20,000 street lights in Copenhagen.And Silver Spring is already working in Paris on an advanced streetlight and traffic signal project designed to reduce public lighting energy consumption by 30 percent over the next 10 years.
If connected lighting and traffic signaling could actually lower energy bills for cities and improve the flow of transportation, that would be invaluable for growing cities that are struggling to adjust to the mass urbanization of the planet.
Silver Spring Networks has a lot of experience connecting hardware from its years as a smart grid company, though here it’ll need to show that software can efficiently analyze data soas to automate systems in a “smart” way. But kudos to the company for branching out into promising markets.