The location

Mecca is the Muslim Holy City, a place where over 4 million people come annually for pilgrimage and around 2 million people live all year round. Tourism is vital for Mecca and so the city has to insure excellent living conditions for locals and visitors. In the quest for offering the best infrastructure, making the street lighting more reliable and cost efficient is a must.

The challenge

We were not allowed any civil works in order to install the system. We had to finish the project under a strict budget and tight deadlines. And as Mecca is a place visited by many people, we needed to take into consideration special security add-ons and features in order to protect the people.

Identifying and implementing the appropriate communication technology, designing the hardware architecture, customizing and localizing the software – all were taken into account. We integrated pole door opening and cable cut detection sensors, but also security features such as pole impact sensors.

The argument

The pilot project, deployed in early 2011, demonstrated successfully the system’s features. The pilot consisted of 30 High Pressure Sodium lamps (250W) controlled using the inteliLIGHT® StreetLight Control Software and an inteliLIGHT® Remote Terminal Unit.

The deployment

The project that today manages almost 25.000 fixtures was deployed in one year since the first hardware delivery. A local partner obtained all the necessary permits and authorizations and also organized the field deployment, with our permanent technical support.

The deployment and software trainings successfully ended in September 2012.

The results

Besides the accurate real-time feedback of any change occurring along the grid, reduced energy loss and energy advanced maintenance optimization tools, Mecca’s new intelligent lighting infrastructure saved a lot of money:

Energy consumption per year in the controlled area BEFORE the system was installed: 42.398 MWh

Energy consumption per year in the controlled area AFTER the system was installed: 32.222 MWh

Savings: 10.176 MWh (-24%)

The Future

Mecca has been using inteliLIGHT® to manage 25.000 street lighting fixtures since September 2012. The municipality plans to connect all 500.000 fixtures in Mecca by 2020.