UK-headquartered company ConFlow’s iLamps are fitted with a 600 W circular solar panel, two lithium-ion batteries and a Nvidia computer processing chip. Everything is remotely monitored via an app, and all the system hardware is housed inside the lamppost.
The idea is to leverage the streetlamps to create a large virtual power plant (VPP) network capable of absorbing the demand placed on the world’s electricity grids by big data centres.
VPP network
Deployment is already happening in Nigeria, the UK and in the United States, and Fitzpatrick told pv magazine that ConFlow is targeting half a million streetlamp units in the pipeline by next year. But the streetlamp isn’t really the product.
“We’re building a platform for AI for power, comms and data. The iLamp is just the node that we put all of that through,” Fitzpatrick explained.
“A lot of people say we can’t compete with a large-scale data centre by putting GPUs into streetlights. That’s true. But we don’t have to cool ours so we’re already more efficient and the compute is more efficient, and it costs us and the environment less.”
He added that the streetlamp VPP network provides a sort of intermediary between the larger data centres doing higher compute learning tasks.
“The iLamp brings the data centre closer to your phone for lower demand tasks like asking ChatGPT a question,” said Fitzpatrick. This is known as inference and the latency is less than what’s required for learning-based tasks.
Business model
Local authorities and governments pay for the compute-per-hour and for the power the lamps provide. At the moment, ConFlow charges $0.69c per compute hour, which Fitzpatrick claimed is “really cheap for inference compute for artificial intelligence (AI).” Each iLamp generates about $6,308 (USD 4,500) per annum.
“We also charge a little bit for the power because we want to create green utilities in every location,” the CEO added. “If there’s 50,000 iLamps in a state, we create a green utility and we sell the power to the government at a green kilowatt hour of power but at a very low rate. The green utility is far more beneficial to the end user than it is to us… it gives them loads of benefits like carbon credits.”
ConFlow is in talks with local authorities to deploy the lamps in the UK, as well as in Kazakhstan, Sri Lanka, India, Kenya, Nigeria, and the United States. Licensing is available in most countries already. The biggest problem is the red tape involved, and Fitzpatrick said the company has gravitated towards early deployment in countries with less bureaucratic restrictions, like Nigeria.
Intelligence services
The type of inference-based intelligence data the lamps provide depends on the user’s requirements. The state picks what services they want ranging from weather data, autonomous vehicle connections, traffic data, building security, sports performance, and even gunshot detection, all delivered via an AI powered camera inside the lamp at head height.
“From speed spotting to gunshot prevention to sports, we’re doing 80 applications like that, because we can teach the camera literally anything. We’re working with a local drama department to help us teach the camera,” said Fitzpatrick.
Panic buttons can also be installed in the iLamps to alert emergency services. Fitzpatrick is not too concerned about the possibility of people stealing computer chips or solar panels from the lamps. As he said, the solar is built into the lamp and anyone hoping to steal it would need an angle grinder and to disable the camera. If the GPU is removed from the lamp, it is automatically fried and therefore useless. “Nobody can steal 50,000 lamps”, said Fitzpatrick.
He also defended the surveillance aspect of the service, claiming ConFlow provides a service that governments want to buy.
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