Associated British Ports (ABP) selected Signify subsidiary Telensa to provide smart lighting for the ports of Southampton and Ipswich and the Hams Hall rail freight terminal.

Telensa’s Planet is providing a centrally managed, adaptable, lighting service that can be fine-tuned at the click of a mouse. This is enabling robust and adaptable smart lighting across the three estates.

ABP implemented a review of its high mast lighting across a number of locations and identified opportunities to make energy savings as well as improve the control of light levels within individual cargo handling compounds.

To achieve the energy savings, the original HID luminaires were replaced with more energy efficient CU Phosco LED luminaires. The Planet smart area lighting is now live at the three ports. The estates all benefit from remotely and individually controlled area lightings.

The two ports and the rail freight terminal are busy hubs supporting a range of cargo and passenger related activities. Planet divided the sites into zones and provided differential lighting policies reflecting the type of activity taking place within each zone. These lighting policies can be changed in real time as activity levels ebb and flow.

Changes can be made at any time from any location and by any authorised person, all at the click of a mouse. Lights can be controlled on an individual basis, in grouped zones or across the estate as a whole.

While each port estate team can log in and manage their own lights, ABP staff get to see data relating to energy usage, light status, carbon emissions and overall performance across all three sites. As Planet comes with built-in plug-ins, it can be integrated with other building and asset management systems in use at the ports.

“The Telensa facility has proved invaluable during the last 18 months where cargo volumes have fluctuated due to supply chain variability,” said Andy Robertson of ABP Southampton’s electrical engineering team. “We have been able to light individual zones, adapting the lighting in line with the type and level of activity taking place, and make substantial energy savings of 15% by controlling the light output of compounds based on usage.”

Andy Gowen, CEO at Telensa, added: “ABP’s strategic port locations are a vital link in the national supply chain. Telensa Planet is a value-added service supporting ABP as they continue to provide world-class facilities to their customers and handle vast quantities of cargo safely, efficiently and sustainably. Our deployment for ABP is highly innovative in that the central management system software is provided centrally across three sites. Not only does it make it highly robust and secure, but this cloud-based approach from our secure datacentre is cost-effective to deploy and scale.”

The port of Southampton is the UK’s number one vehicle handling port, handling 850,000 vehicles a year. As Europe’s leading turnaround cruise port, it welcomes around two million passengers annually and is home to the UK fleets of the largest cruise line operators in the world. It is also home to the second largest container terminal in the UK. This mixed range of activities requires different lighting policies at different times. Telensa has added smart connectivity to 600 lights, which are connected into the central management system.

ABP Ipswich offers ro-ro facilities, three aggregates terminals, 16,000 square metres of covered warehousing, a dedicated timber-treatment centre, bulk storage terminals and a container terminal equipped with a 40-tonne capacity crane and rail-mounted gantries. Specialist plant, equipment and weighbridges are provided in the port to cater for heavy-lift and project cargoes. Telensa provides wireless connectivity and central management to 300 lights at this port.

ABP Hams Hall is the country’s busiest inland rail freight terminal handling in the region of 120,000 TEUs each year. The 11ha terminal is situated next to the Nuneaton-to-Birmingham railway line and handles deep-sea and short-sea traffic to and from ports such as Southampton, Tilbury and Felixstowe, as well as traffic via the Channel Tunnel and domestic traffic from Scotland. Here Telensa has deployed its technology across 100 lights.