This report provides Transforma Insights’ view on the public space lighting market. This segment includes the monitoring, control, and management of lighting for streets and other public spaces, typically provided by local government or utilities. Streetlights are a significant contributor to the electricity bills of local authorities, accounting for 15-40% of the total energy consumption in cities worldwide. In many countries, this will result in significant greenhouse gas emissions. To reduce this cost and make streetlighting more sustainable, governments across the globe are spending heavily to replace them with smart LED lamps that can be controlled remotely using different technologies, including Wi-Fi, Cellular, NB-IoT, and RF mesh.
The report provides a detailed definition of the sector, analysis of market development and profiles of the key vendors in the space. It also provides a summary of the current status of adoption and Transforma Insights’ ten-year forecasts for the market. The forecasts include analysis of the number of IoT connections by geography, the technologies used and revenue.
A full set of forecast data, including country-level forecasts, sector breakdowns and public/private network splits, is available through the IoT Forecast tool.
The "Market development" section of the report begins by examining how local governments and public authorities worldwide implement ambient lighting to enhance citizen safety. It then explores the environmental impact of this practice, highlighting the rising electricity consumption and its harmful effects. For instance, in Australia, street lighting is the largest source of emissions from local government, accounting for 30-60% (including 95,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions) of their total emissions and is responsible for the consumption of USD125 million worth of energy every year.
It then explains that to reduce energy bills and to make street lighting more efficient and sustainable, smart LED lamps are now being increasingly deployed, discusses the communication technologies they run on, and talks about their energy-saving potential. It also exclaims that many countries are choosing this low-cost option of LED lamps to get a quick return on their investments, IoT solutions can enhance such savings by ensuring more granular control of individual lights. It then talks about some of the government regulations about upgrading to LEDs and smart lighting and their benefits. For instance, the Chicago streetlight modernisation program was completed in 2022 and replaced 280,000 streetlights in the city with smart LED lights over a four-year period. The total budget of the project was USD160 million, and the city is estimated to achieve savings of USD100 million within the first 10 years of operation.
In a tabular format, the report then extensively discusses global street lighting deployments and includes countries and regions like Abu Dhabi, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Togo, the United Kingdom, Uruguay, and the US. For further granularity, it bifurcates these countries into national or state levels and then discusses the deployment details. Case in point, at a national level in Saudi Arabia, out of the total 1.54 million public streetlamp poles, more than 150,000 streetlights were controlled using the inteliLIGHT smart street lighting technology by 2018. On the other hand, it charts that in Sweden, 550 LON networked streetlamps were installed in 2007 in Gothenburg and in 2023, Ovanåker Municipality replaced 3,500 smart streetlights.
It then goes on to describe other benefits of deploying smart streetlights, including identifying losses and theft from power lines (in countries like India) and optimising traffic management. For instance, the cities of San Diego and Los Angeles have installed thousands of cameras and sensors on streetlights to help authorities monitor and enforce traffic laws in real-time, while also ensuring that crimes do not occur in the area.
The report then talks about some of the barriers that may impact their deployment in the near future (like constraints in government budget) and provides some examples of relevant IoT deployments in this application, including Signify replacing 60% of the existing luminaires in Bratislava and Itron deploying connected streetlights across Copenhagen in Denmark.
In the market forecasts section, we provide a summary of the forecasts from the Transforma Insights IoT Forecast Database:
The report charts the growth in the number of public space lighting devices, which will grow from 40.8 million in 2024 to 156.4 million in 2034. Transforma Insights forecasts are compiled on a country-by-country basis. This report includes a regional summary, showing splits between Australasia, Greater China, North America, Europe, Japan, Latin America, MENA, Russia & Central Asia, South East Asia, South Korea, India & South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Transforma Insights’ IoT forecasts include splits between the various connectivity technologies as follows: 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G mMTC, 5G non-mMTC, LPWA (non-mMTC), Satellite, Short Range, and Other.
This section discusses which technologies will be used in the Public Space Lighting Application Group.
This part of the report discusses the market growth in terms of revenue (module revenue, service wrap revenue, and VAC revenue). Transforma Insights estimates that the revenue in the Public Space Lighting Application Group will grow at a CAGR of 1%.
