Pennsylvania utility Duquesne Light is using Itron’s smart street lighting technology to modernise its infrastructure and enable smart-city applications.

A provider of safe, reliable and resilient electricity to more than 600,000 customers in Allegheny and Beaver counties in southwestern Pennsylvania, Duquesne Light will deploy around 60,000 Itron mesh-enabled streetlight nodes to provide secure two-way monitoring and control for outdoor street and area lighting.

Duquesne Light will also use Itron’s Streetlight Vision (SLV) smart cities central management software and SLV Go integrated field operations platform. These should help the utility improve energy efficiencies and optimise streetlight performance with asset management, analytics and control capabilities. With this, the utility will be able to enhance the customer experience and improve operations by proactively alerting Duquesne Light of lamp failures, location changes and power supply failures.

In addition, the smart streetlights will provide a multi-application industrial IoT canopy capable of supporting additional smart city and smart utility sensors and applications.

“As part of Duquesne Light’s vision of a clean energy future for all, we are committed to investing in new technologies that benefit our communities and customers and ensure a more sustainable, equitable future,” said Yvonne Phillips, director of meter operations at Duquesne Light. “We look forward to modernising our lighting infrastructure with Itron’s smart street lighting, which will improve asset maintenance and enhance operational efficiency while also enabling additional smart city applications as the need arises in the future.”

John Marcolini, senior vice president at Itron, added: “We are thrilled to collaborate with Duquesne Light to deploy smart lighting that will proactively meet the needs of tomorrow, today. Duquesne Light will be able to save energy and improve asset management with real-time visibility into every streetlight while simultaneously laying a foundation for future IoT and smart city use cases.”

Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Duquesne Light’s 1700-plus employees provide power to more than 600,000 customers across southwestern Pennsylvania, including the city of Pittsburgh.