Clear Blue Technologies’ Illumient Lights Up Railway Safety Switches

Partnership with Metro-Tech to provide lighting for railway switchyard demonstrates versatility and growth of Illumient.

An example of Clear Blue Technologies’ Illumient solar lighting solution at the Greenwich railyard in New Jersey.

Clear Blue Technologies International Inc. (TSXV: CBLU) (FRANKFURT: OYA), the Smart Off-Grid Company, in partnership with Metro-Tech Sales & Consulting, Inc. announces the completion of a project that provided Illumient solar lights to illuminate safety switches in a Conrail operated switchyard in Greenwich County, New Jersey. This project shows Clear Blue’s reliable smart off-grid lighting is the valued choice for mission critical devices and safety infrastructure in a variety of industries, where reliability and off-grid power are key requirements.

“Given Clear Blue’s proven track record in providing reliable, low-cost smart off-grid power to critical infrastructure, our technology can support the mission critical safety requirements of railway infrastructure,” said Miriam Tuerk, CEO, Clear Blue Technologies. “The installation of our Illumient systems, for illuminating train safety switches, demonstrates many possible use cases across diverse multiple industry sectors.”

In 2019, to improve the safety and reliability of the railroad switchyard, Conrail decided to implement a smart off-grid solar lighting solution for this critical area. Ensuring reliable lighting of the rail switches and without the grid were key requirements for this project, which was completed in January of 2020.

Ron Stadler, Sales Representative with Metro-Tech, stated: “In the railway industry, a slight misstep or mistake in switching tracks or directing trains can have catastrophic results for both the railroads and the public at large. Conrail was looking for reliable power solutions to light their railroad switches, and many of these switches are not near reliable power grid services, so it wasn’t cost effective to develop the infrastructure. We knew that the best off-grid solution would be Illumient as Clear Blue has repeatedly proven the technology’s reliability and capacity in a variety of mission critical off-grid applications.”

Demand for Solar Off-grid Lighting for Critical Infrastructure

Clear Blue is seeing an uptake of solar off-grid lighting in a variety of industries that are looking to increase safety, resilience and security. In the case of railway switching, a failure in lighting could have dire consequences resulting in accidents causing death or environmental damage. For this reason, mission critical infrastructures, including that in the railway industry, have higher uptime availability and performance requirements.

Clear Blue's Smart Off-Grid technology ensures the delivery of reliable lighting services and proactive identification and advanced management of failures or maintenance issues to avoid service interruption. With the Illumience remote monitoring and management service platform, customers can remotely know when the system is working and how well it is performing. The technology provides advanced notice of when a failure could occur so preventative action can be taken.

Extreme Weather Drives Need for Reliability

Knowing how well a system is performing is particularly important given the variety of extreme weather events that are starting to become the new normal. Railway switches are critical infrastructure and need to function through temperature extremes and lack of sunlight. When those switches need lighting, it's critical to make sure that those lights do their job. Clear Blue’s focus is on mission critical infrastructure so the technology, including the solar off-grid lighting solution: Illumient, is specifically built to deliver maximum uptime through predictive energy and weather forecasting.

Clear Blue's unique, patented predictive energy and weather forecasting analytics provide the ability to forecast out the service uptime over the next five days. Through this technique, potential upcoming outages, due to winter storms or summer heatwaves, can be anticipated and forecasted. The technology doesn’t just identify the number of hours of sun per day (weather forecasting), but then uses this information to identify how much potential energy will be harvested from that sun (energy forecasting) through information on the performance of the system, the state of the battery and the amount of energy being consumed.

This analysis can identify if the system will provide the necessary service and if there is a discrepancy, then it can anticipate this and manage through it. Clear Blue has the ability to reduce the energy consumption and/or provide an emergency ride through capability. In this way - the lights stay on ensuring the safety and security of this key infrastructure. It delivers maximum uptime through extreme weather events through Clear Blue’s patented energy and weather forecasting, together with comprehensive light load control.

Preventing and Managing System Outages

Ensuring maximum uptime is also about anticipating and proactively managing failures and unforeseen outages. Clear Blue’s unparalleled troubleshooting and remediation tools allow its customers to see when trouble is coming, remotely address issues in the 75% of cases where a service call isn’t needed, and remotely managing power to remain operational even while a service crew is deployed to undertake a repair. Plus, with Energy-as-a-Service (EaaS) Clear Blue's service team, who are experts in off-grid power, supports and operates the system for customers. This allows customers to focus on their business, like effectively managing freight rail services, while the energy experts at Clear Blue bring expert off-grid power experience to ensure the lights stay on.

Clear Blue’s Illumient systems have previously been installed in roadways, intersections, remote paths, busy city streets and even barges in the middle of rivers. Illumient lighting systems can include a LED light pole, solar panel or wind turbine, battery, smart controller, an integrated wireless communications network, and the Illumience cloud-based power management software. The Illumience predictive weather and energy analytics, and the ability to change lighting profiles online are used to preserve battery power and ensure lighting service in all seasons of the year, while reducing maintenance and installation costs. With reliable lighting and a lower cost than installing grid infrastructure, Clear Blue’s Illumient is the optimal choice for mission critical safety systems.

www.clearbluetechnologies.com

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