A while back I noticed that my street lights had changed, from two warm orange-glow street lights on the whole block, to one cold LED white light every 4-5 houses on the block and beyond….in fact all through the valley!
I am sure they were installed under some green initiative, though I fail to see how replacing two lights with over 20 would be more efficient.
I am unsure the exact date they installed them, but I must say as a person who works from my home, they were very stealth about it, as I never saw, or heard, them being installed.
I wrote the municipality promptly and asked what type of light they were, as well as what the black circular bit was on the top. This was the response I received:
“Good Morning Adrienne,
I have spoken with the Buildings Manager regarding the LED Streetlights that were installed in your neighborhood. They are the NXT-Lite series LED streetlights and the black circular thing on top is a photocell (turns the lights on at night and off during the day).
If you have any further questions feel free to contact our office!”
We should ALL have questions….
While the general public wavers between whether a Smart City is a conspiracy, or that it is a wonderful idea and should be ethically adopted in our region as soon as possible to save the planet, many others are trying to warn of the possible dystopic future on the horizon when we are all connected and monitored 24/7.
Possibly the person I was interacting with at North Cowichan did not know that the “black circular bit” on top serves as a receptacle for multiple monitoring devices to be placed on top with a simple twist-on, tool-less feature. These ‘options’ all then report to a central computer that dim the lights, and can record and monitor vehicle and people movements, sound, air quality and speed. All for your protection and safety I am sure. Source : https://www.liveablecities.com/videos
Reference https://www.liveablecities.com/product-catalogue
What does the lighting “support”?
Talq excerpts: “Thanks to TALQ version 2.0, getting log values (e.g. temperature, voltage, current, energy) from devices, reading real-time values from a device, sending configuration parameters to a device or remote controlling it, becomes obvious for CMS software developers. “Our clear goal is to make it easy for cities to connect any smart city device to their CMS so that any data produced is stored and displayed and can be used in any other Smart City processes and applications.” explains Simon Dunkley, Secretary General of the TALQ Consortium.”
OSCP seems to have been changed to Open Smart GRID Protocol: “The Open Smart Grid Protocol (OSGP) is a family of specifications published by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) used in conjunction with the ISO/IEC 14908 control networking standard for smart grid applications. OSGP is optimized to provide reliable and efficient delivery of command and control information for smart meters, direct load control modules, solar panels, gateways, and other smart grid devices. With over 5 million OSGP-based smart meters and devices deployed worldwide it is one of the most widely used smart meter and smart grid device networking standards.” – Wiki
‘API for data exchange “What is an API?
An API is a set of programming codes that enables data transmission between one software product and another. It also contains the terms of this data exchange.
Take a tour of this technology, and try to pick out the language being used to gloss over things like “interacting with smart meters”, and “high enough to not be tampered with”? …. Why would one tamper with a regular streetlight, except possibly because it may not just be an ‘innocent’ streetlight?
Tour: https://www.liveablecities.com/videos
Cowichan Valley is selling the idea of Urban/Growth containment boundaries, and “growth Centres”, as is the entire world for the most part, but how will the population be coaxed into living in them? More to come on that in future articles.
Once Smart Cities were called a conspiracy theory, now they are touted on Mainstream media, as a solution to a “global crisis”. We see in Oxford England how they attempted to keep people in their 15 min cities through monitoring technologies, and how the citizens are fighting back. We have been warned of climate lockdowns, and we ask, how will they enforce more lockdowns in the future? We see technology and Smart Grids ( named specifically in the CVRD OCP) as the ultimate solution to monitoring citizens’ movements.
Join us as we dig deeper into the slow installation of technologies and policy in the Cowichan Valley, that continue to follow The U.N.s Sustainability Goals, Just Transition, 15 Min Cities, and the Global Network of Things.
– A Richards