Imtac LLC, a leader in IT and Industry 4.0 solution in Oman and Signify, formerly known as Philips Lighting, the world leader in lighting, today signed a contract, to provide state-of-the-art Smart Street lighting solutions to Muscat Municipality.

The contract was signed in the presence of top management of both companies.

“As a global leader in connected lighting, we are proud to provide our latest IoT technology of Interact City in Muscat Municipality using more than 20,000 connected street lighting luminaires throughout the project providing up to 85 per cent energy saving, reducing maintenance costs while leveraging the value of smart street lighting systems for additional benefits,” said Goktug Gur, President and CEO of Signify METAP.

Fareed Al Hinai, Vice Chairman IMTAC, said, “We are very excited about the implementation of energy saving street lighting solution for Muscat Municipality and to help create sustainable infrastructure in Oman.

“Our relationship with Signify is critical to our Smart City roadmap and it addresses Oman’s 2040 vision”, added Fareed.

By signing this contract, the two companies will implement more than 13,000 smart LED lights in the city of Muscat that will be controlled by 370 smart remote controls. Once implemented, the two companies would have an installation base of more than 20,000 smart street lamps in the city that are all controlled remotely, thus saving a significant amount of energy for the municipality and lower the carbon footprint in the city.

Mukesh Arora, CEO, IMTAC LLC, said: “Our partnership with Signify has helped us combine our widely used Industry 4.0 solution with the global best practices in lighting from Signify. Imtac LLC, through its Smart City brand ’empyreal’ is a leader in Industry 4.0 solution in the areas of Municipal Operations, Building Management, Urban & Social Infrastructure, Healthcare, Water & Wastewater management, and Manufacturing Industries.”

Smart street lighting systems with their dimming-based energy-saving capabilities are finding widespread deployment across the world.

Over the past few years, millions of smart streetlights with associated control systems have been added by city municipalities across the globe. LED lamps have served as a default replacement for conventional lights which were consuming multiple times more energy than their LED replacement.

Municipal bodies have the responsibility of providing appropriate lighting levels in the city and at the same time, keep the energy costs to a minimum. Most cities such as Muscat have strategic plans that specify how lighting is to be provided and their intensity to be controlled online for different areas of the city. By doing this there is direct saving in the energy cost.

Zeyad Al Zadjali, the Director of Lighting and traffic-light at Muscat Municipality, said: “Energy-saving and city beautification through streetlights has been a very high priority for Muscat Municipality.

“We have deployed world-class technology to implement LED streetlights that are remotely controlled using state-of-the-art LED luminaires and computing hardware and software.”

The latest lighting and control technology from Imtac and Signify helps city planners in creating and executing dynamic operation schedules, and dimming levels for the city sections. This capability offers a variety of opportunities for the municipality to keep the illumination at its optimal and reduce the energy cost significantly thus making the city more sustainable.

“Our offering on smart street lighting is yet another successful milestone for Signify on leveraging technology for brighter lives and a better world. As customer centricity lies at the heart of our core values, we always use our know-how to combine technology and digitalization for sustainability according to our customer’s needs,” added George Brax, Signify’ s Country Leader for Middle East (excl. KSA).”

It is estimated that there are 300 million streetlights in the world and this market is growing rapidly. In the past, only about 10-20 per cent of the streetlamps were smart controlled. This is however set to change and grow multiple times as per the industry estimates.

With lighting alone accounting for such a large portion of a city’s total energy consumption, the need for cost-effective and sustainable options is crucial. Simply switching to LED lighting can result in electricity savings of up to 50-60 per cent and by adding smart control systems, the overall energy savings can go up to 80 per cent.