Halifax company helps illuminate the world with smart streetlights
A Halifax-based technology company is lighting up the world with energy-efficient LED streetlights that have a range of practical applications and can reduce energy costs by up to 60%.
LED Roadway Lighting began as a lighting company but has transformed itself into a clean-technology business with a global reach. Its smart street-lighting products can be found in 66 countries around the world.
The company’s adaptive control applications can dim streetlights, catch roadway speeders and detect gunshots. They can also monitor the local temperature, carbon dioxide levels and traffic. Its roadway luminaires can flash different colours to warn drivers to pull over for approaching emergency vehicles.
“The applications are quite diverse,” says Jeff Libis, LED Roadway Lighting Global Vice President, Sales. “We’re being pulled into the smart-city business.”
The company’s main focus is on smart street lighting, but its award-winning products can also illuminate parking lots, parks, mines, ski slopes and, in one project under development, detect lightning at soccer fields. Another application allows utility companies to monitor data in real time from their electrical grids.
Smart street lights in Tel Aviv
Canada’s trade agreements, including the modernized Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement, help LED Roadway Lighting take its lighting technology to new international markets.
In fact, the company usually focuses on exporting only to markets that have free trade agreements with Canada, says Libis. For example, the close trading relationship Canada enjoys with Israel helped LED Roadway Lighting land a contract to install smart streetlights in a suburb of Tel Aviv.
The company connected with the largest local electrical distributor in Israel and sold about 10,000 smart street lights. Around 2,000 of those lights are connected to a wireless network and can be controlled remotely. In addition, LED Roadway Lighting’s newest project in Israel will light up airport runways so planes can land safely.
“None of this would have been possible without the help of Canada’s Trade Commissioner Service [TCS],” says Libis. The TCS also helped the 270-employee company set up manufacturing operations in the United Kingdom, Brazil, China and the Caribbean.
“The TCS has been extremely helpful for us along the way; an invaluable resource,” says Libis
LED Roadway Lighting was also a pilot participant in Global Affairs Canada’s Canadian Technology Accelerator program, which has helped the company expand into new global markets and facilitated links to on-the-ground expertise.
To remain competitive while it explores new markets for its products, LED Roadway Lighting has a research and development lab led by a team of design experts in optics, power supplies, adaptive controls and reliability engineering.
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