Paris “the city of lights” has taken a smart step forward as EVESA, the city’s streetlight and traffic control systems operator, finalised a contract with California based Silver Spring Networks to revolutionise lighting across the French capital.

After a successful pilot project, Silver Spring Networks announced an expansion of its relationship with EVESA earlier this month. The arrangement includes deployment of a city-wide canopy network connecting the above-ground and subterranean cabinet-based controllers for street and traffic lights across the city.

“With more than 2 million citizens and 16 million annual visitors, modernising the public lighting infrastructure for ‘The City of Lights’ while preserving its world-renowned aesthetic is a crucial undertaking. We are excited to now complete the first phase of our project and extend our relationship with EVESA to deploy a smart city canopy network across Paris”, said Scott Lang, Chairman, President and CEO, Silver Spring Networks. “EVESA’s diligent planning and intense technology testing help ensure the citizens of Paris receive a globally proven, highly reliable, and secure smart city solution”.

Silver Spring’s smart city platform helps municipalities deploy intelligent lighting systems that dramatically improve system reliability, increase energy efficiency, lower operational costs, extend equipment life-spans, and enhance citizen safety and quality of life. The open, standards-based solution also enables cities to establish a platform for future smart city applications and services such as traffic management, environmental sensors, smart parking, electric vehicle charging, electricity metering, water conservation, and many more.

For a city, lighting can be a “gateway drug” to a larger smart grid and smart city implementation. In many cases smart lighting allows for the first large-scale deployment of sensors across the city’s streets and buildings, producing Big Data that triggers a smart urban revolution, as explored in our recent report: Big Data for Smart Buildings

Silver Spring was selected to participate in a streetlight and traffic signal management project for Paris, part of the city’s efforts to reduce its public lighting energy consumption by 30% over 10 years. The project in which Silver Spring is participating is the first part of a multistep process to manage a complex array of thousands of streetlights, streetlight control boxes, traffic signal control boxes, and other elements of Paris’ public lighting and traffic control infrastructure. It’s also part of an effort to upgrade Paris’ electricity grid and turn Paris into a smart city.

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Silver Spring further established itself in the French market with the acquisition of Streetlight.Vision, a French company that helped it bring Internet-enabled streetlights to cities including Paris, Copenhagen, Dublin, Miami, Oslo, and Barcelona, Spain.

"Smart cities are going to become about much more than lighting projects", said Eric Dresselhuys, Silver Spring Networks executive vice president and co-founder. "We think Streetlight.Vision is very well-positioned to extend their product to support more things. You can imagine traffic safety, environmental monitoring, waste control, any number of applications that affect how we live our lives in urban environments every day".

In addition to Paris, Silver Spring has recently been selected by Florida Power & Light for what is believed to be the world’s largest connected lighting project, nearly 500,000 networked street lights across South Florida. But what makes the Paris project different, aside from retrofitting new technologies in one of the oldest “world capitals”, is the importance of its urban lighting beyond practical purposes.

A programme of smart street lighting in a city like Paris is a landmark project for the lighting and smart city industry. Overcoming aesthetic and practical obstacles in an old city known for its lighting and beauty will send waves across the world. If they can smarten street lighting in Paris, they can smarten street lighting in any city in the world.