Economic Analysis of a Controllable Device with Smart Grid Features Applied to LED Street Lighting System Milena F. Pinto, Thiago R. F. Mendonça, Fabricio Coelho and Henrique A. C. Braga Federal University of Juiz de Fora – UFJF Juiz de Fora, MG – Brazil milena.faria@engenharia.ufjf.br Abstract—Almost all luminaires that are used in street lighting system does not have communication, control and management infrastructure. Moreover, the artificial lighting system is responsible for the consumption of approximately 30% of all electricity generated in the world. Within this context, the LED technology offers flexibility and high efficiency, being suitable to be connected with smart devices, allowing the usage of possible alternatives to reduce energy consumption and providing significant economic saving. This work aims to perform an economic analysis of a controllable device with smart grid features applied to LED street lighting system in order to evaluate the efficiency of its usage as well as possible benefits on public lighting system and monitoring of low voltage grid parameters. The results have shown low payback periods and a promising internal return rate when compared with other applications, such as saving accounts. The smart grid features on the controller allows simple integration with renewable sources and central management and controlling lighting system. Keywords— Economic Analysis, Power quality parameters, Smart grid, Smart lighting device, Street lighting system I. INTRODUCTION The conventional luminaires applied to street lighting system are not able to perform communication, control and management features [1]. Furthermore, the system is also not capable to measure useful information from the luminaire, i.e. energy consumption and detection of possible failures in the luminaire. In this sense, it is possible to notice that the large majority of street lighting systems were designed using old equipment and techniques [2]. However, due to the advance in science as well as the increase number of industrial researches regarding the development of modern devices and computational processes, the application of smart and communication technologies in the conventional street lighting systems provides prospects for monitoring, management and automation, allowing the interconnection of different intelligent devices. It is noteworthy that the lamp needs to offer flexibility and high efficiency to accomplish the tasks received from the controller. Besides, for instance, it is not feasible to perform dimming control in high-pressure sodium lamps, which are the most common lamps used in the street lighting systems. In this context, the LED technology has the advantage to meet all the necessary requirements [3] and according to [4], its usage has gained notoriety due to its excellent photometric characteristics, such as high color rendering index (CRI), high luminous efficacy (lm / W), high mechanical strength, long lifespan (up to 100.000 hours) and reduction of light pollution [5]. It is estimated that about 30% of all electricity generated in the world is used to produce artificial lighting [6]. Therefore, it is possible to notice that artificial lighting systems represent a large potential for energy cost saving. Within this context, the usage of alternatives to reduce energy consumption in lighting systems could provide significant economic saving and reduction of environmental impacts. The so called intelligent lighting system is integrated with several devices, such as sensors, lighting fixtures, transceivers, energy meters, among other elements that allow measurement and controlling of the whole system through autonomous algorithm [12]. In this way, it turns possible the usage of available resources to optimize its functions as well as to solve inheriting issues in lighting systems. With the insertion of smart devices in street lighting system as well as the integration of LED lamps, it is important to perform a deeply analysis to ensure both technical and economic feasibility of these types of prototypes. In this sense, this work aims to perform an economic analysis of a controllable device with smart grid features applied to LED street lighting system in order to evaluate the efficiency of its usage as well as possible benefits on public lighting system. This paper is organized as follows. In Section II is presented a detailed description of the developed intelligent device to be used in smart lighting application as well as to measure power quality parameters, which was proposed by the authors in [7]. It is proposed in the Section III two critical scenarios to economics assessment of the smart device in the street lighting application and they are evaluated using two different dimming strategies. In Section IV are shown the economic analysis concerning all the proposed scenarios and it is performed a 978-1-4673-7554-2/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE 1184