Energy: savings up to 400 million euro with public lighting efficiency system

PELL (Public Energy Living Lab) is a management system developed by ENEA to monitor and control energy consumption of public lighting. In particular, PELL allows to plan energy efficiency measures for 11 million public lights in Italy with potential savings of up to 400 million euro yearly, equal to a third of the electricity bill of 8 thousand Italian Municipalities.

Already being tested in twenty Italian Municipalities, PELL has been included by CONSIP- the “purchasing centre” of the Public Adminstration- in the Agreement “Servizio Luce 4” as quality monitoring tool for the  public lighting grid.

In practice the suppliers that will be awarded the contract must fill out and upload on the PELL platform the data census card for the assigned electrical systems. The IT infrastructure will guarantee an independent energy consumption monitoring and  assessment of the savings obtained thanks to the upgrading measures carried out by the operators.

“Our objective is to make available a reliable, standardized, strategic data collection system to know the current state of the electric systems and evaluate upgrading plans that guarantee reduced consumption, savings in energy bills, safety for citizens, quality of service and enhancement of the city and its heritage”, pointed out Nicoletta Gozo, ENEA coordinator of the Project Lumière & PELL.

“The Agreement “Servizio Luce 4”- he added- introduces for the first time a pure economic model of energy performance contract (EPC) in which the energy savings obtained are shared between PA and supplier, generally an ESCO”.

The upgrading of the national public lighting system, through efficiency measures aimed at replacing lighting technologies and management of the system (es. remote control) would allow to bring down energy consumption by a third, with savings of about 400 million euro and 1 million tonnes of CO2 emissions reduction.

PELL is a digital platform for the collection of data, measurements, energy consumption diagnostics and the analysis of the performance of buildings; thanks to constant monitoring and performances evaluation, it allows to radically innovate management of public lighting, a sector which consumes 5.9 TWh yearly with an expenditure of about 1 billion euro.

The platform works on a data census card containing the “biographical data” of every light, to be filled out by the electrical utility. The IT infrastracture uses smart meters installed on the electrical panel of the energy consumption monitoring device and data transmission systems to the cloud platform for the analysis and processing of information.

“PELL is in line with a profound change of public infrastructures having the  objective of turning them into smart grids through information digitization, real time monitoring and processing of consumptions and performances”, said Mauro Annunziato, Head of the Smart Energy Division of the Energy Technology Department at ENEA.

PELL is an operative tool developed within Lumière, an ENEA research and technological transfer project aiming at promoting energy efficiency in the  sector of public lighting through the development of operative systems and a single management model for electrical systems.

More information at:

Mauro Annunziato –  Casaccia Research Center – mauro.annunziato@enea.it

Nicoletta Gozo –  Ispra Research Center – nicoletta.gozo@enea.it