ESTCP 2015 Project-of-the-Year Award for Energy and Water



(Initially Released December 7, 2015) Exterior lighting accounts for nearly 10% of the electricity consumed at Department of Defense (DoD) military installations. Many of the existing exterior lighting systems use inefficient high pressure sodium or metal halide lights that are controlled with photosensors that turn lights on regardless of usage patterns. Dr. Satyen Mukherjee of Philips Research and his team demonstrated that significant electricity savings can be achieved by implementing efficient LED lighting sources and smart lighting controls. 

The project evaluated three exterior lighting applications at U.S. Army Base Fort Sill, Oklahoma:   

  1. Dynadimmer for Parking Lots. Dynadimmer is a standalone fixture-by-fixture control architecture that uses a preprogrammed dimming profile integrated in the LED driver to reduce the light levels during periods of low occupancy. 
  2. Starsense for Street Lighting. Starsense is a radio frequency mesh networked system in which each light fixture is controlled independently using an outdoor lighting controller (OLC) added to each LED fixture. The OLCs are set to a programmable dimming profile, and the entire lighting network is displayed on a remote dashboard allowing remote visualization and control of the system at all times.
  3. Lighting on Demand (LOD) for Maintenance Areas. The LOD system couples the Starsense mesh network with motion detection sensors, allowing dynamic adaptive control of the light levels in each fixture.  

Advanced controls with LED light sources reduced energy consumption for exterior lights by 60 to 90% depending on the application. These energy savings were achieved while also improving the quality of light in terms of color rendering and brightness. In all three systems, the lighting levels measured in the demonstrations exceeded Illuminating Engineering Society of North America illuminance requirements.

Efficient LED lighting sources and smart controls can be used to achieve significant energy savings and improve illumination in exterior lighting applications at DoD military installations across the country. 

For this significant work, Dr. Mukherjee and his project team received the 2015 ESTCP Project-of-the-Year Award for Energy and Water. Project Overview

  Project Team 

  • Dr. Satyen Mukherjee
  • Mr. Dan Jiang
  • Dr. Jianfeng Wang
  • Dr. Dave Cavalcanti
  • Mr. Joey Liu
  • Mr. Bill Sgambati
  • Mr. Gene Turkenich
  • Mr. Viktor Gornstein
  • Mr. Kiran Challapali
  • Mr. Harry Broers
  • Mr. Pieter-Jan Kuyten