Telensa, the leading provider of connected street lighting and smart city applications, has been awarded a new contract by its long-standing customer, Essex Highways, to replace and upgrade the smart street lighting controls on 82,000 residential streetlights across the county.

An early adopter of Telensa’s wireless streetlight controls, Essex County Council chose Telensa smart controls over ten years ago to reduce their streetlight energy consumption and make it easier and more efficient to manage, maintain and operate their streetlight estate. The new contract will see Essex County Council deploy Telensa’s next generation smart streetlighting product.

Essex County Council has one of the largest streetlight central management systems in the world helping the council to control its street lighting more efficiently. The new deployment will introduce Telensa’s latest technology into the network with support for advanced smart lighting features such as adaptive dimming based on traffic flows, automatic location of assets and open software interfaces for seamless integration with other smart city systems in the future.

Councillor Lee Scott, Essex County Council’s Cabinet Member for Highways Maintenance and Sustainable Transport, said: “Essex will make savings every year as the remaining non-LED streetlights are upgraded to LEDs with smart controls. We know from experience that they will save on average around 60% energy usage, so reducing costs and saving thousands of tons of carbon emissions involved in generating electricity. The new programmable LED lights will be controlled and monitored by the Telensa central management system, PLANet, and via Telensa’s next-generation of “Telecell” smart controls.

The new partnership deepens Essex County Council’s commitment to controlling their streetlights from a Central Management System and Telensa’s market leading solution PLANet.

“Our new contract with Essex Highways is testimony to the benefits that Telensa’s Central Management System has provided the county. We are now seeing some of our earliest customers re-committing to Telensa based on the benefits they have realized over the last decade. We are excited to be introducing our next generation set of products.” says Brent Hudson, CEO, Telensa.

Using its network planning software and consulting services, Telensa has modelled Essex County Council’s streetlight infrastructure to optimize its set-up and to provide a future proof, resilient and scalable system in line with the Council’s changing needs.

Deployment is already underway to give the Council a robust system for at least the next ten years and this will form the foundation of the upgrade of 82,000 streetlights to LED.