LED and street lighting specialist Harvard Enginering has chosen Star, which provides on-demand computing and communication services to UK businesses, as its technology partner for an innovative lighting control project.

Harvard has selected The Star Platform to provide high availability access to the company’s revolutionary wireless street lighting solution LeafNut. The service, delivered by Star, will initially give 30 local authorities the ability to remotely manage their street lighting sytems over a 3G network. The project will involve more than 40,000 street lights, and will help the local authorities to save up to 40 per cent on their energy bills.

The hosted service means Harvard Engineering can help customers manage and monitor important data, such as power consumption sent and received by each street light, and then communicate this back to the central system.

“We are excited about this partnership with Star, because it releases us to concentrate on our core business,” says Martin Baum, finance director at Harvard Engineering. “We chose Star specifically because of their highly resilient and secure service, and the scalability of the platform is crucial to our growth plans. With Star’s support, we can deliver LeafNut to new customers quickly and seamlessly.”

The LeafNut system has already been deployed in nearly 30 locations across the world, mainly in the UK. The system can save up to £46 per light per year and reduce carbom emissions by 100kg per light, per year. LeafNut uses the WiMAC wireless Central Management System to remotely monitor and control the output of each individual street light. The technology reduces maintenance costs by identifying lamp problems in advance and accurately predicting lamp failure.