The Times of India        17.12.2017

CHENNAI:
The city corporation has inched closer towards implementing a
centralised control and monitoring system for the 7,077 feeder boxes and
2.8 lakh LED street lights connected in the city.

The civic body
has received technical bids from service providers last week, after
tenders were floated for setting up the system two months ago.

The
project, if implemented, will help in better monitoring of feeder boxes
even in remote locations and will help the civic body attend to faults
immediately, thereby improving service, officials said. The tentative
cost of the project is ₹48 crore, of which the civic body has been
sanctioned ₹14.07 crore under the Nirbhaya fund.

The feeder pillar
boxes are currently provided with automatic timer-based on/ off
switches. The street lights too are switched on and turned off at
scheduled timings. “But the functioning of these switching points have
to be done manually. This system will help in monitoring of the
switching points from one location,” an engineer with the electrical
department said.

The engineer also pointed out that changes in the
scheduling of on/off of the lights will have to be done directly at the
feeder box only and due to frequent operation over a period of time, the
timer loses accuracy.

“This is another reason why different set of
street lights switch on and off at different timings. For instance, in
some areas, street lights would not have switched on even after it gets
dark while in some areas they are on before daylight fades,” a senior
official with city corporation said. Further, the switch on/ off time
for streetlights varies across the year, depending on the sunlight
intensity.

To make these changes, workers will have to go to the
feeder boxes. “By group monitoring, we ensure that all lights go on at
the same time and do not have depend on a field worker for that,” the
official added.

The system will also help the electrical department
monitor faults in streetlights and attend to them before they are raised
by the public. This group monitoring and control centre will be
integrated with the command and control centre of the city corporation,
which is expected to be up and running by January next year.