Rio de Janeiro and Kaohsiung City progress smart city plans

ST Engineering has been chosen as technology partner for smart city projects in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Kaohsiung City in southern Taiwan.

The projects include the largest integrated smart city deployment in Latin America and a key rail infrastructure programme in Taiwan.

Smart rail

ST Engineering’s smart mobility business is part of a consortium with Hyundai Rotem to be awarded a seven-year, $445m contract by the Kaohsiung City Mass Rapid Transit Bureau to provide turnkey rail services comprising smart metro solutions, trains and a power supply system for the Kaohsiung MRT Red Line Extension.

The 13km extension line, which is a key rail infrastructure programme in Kaohsiung City, consists of six elevated stations with an option for two additional stations.

Working with partners, ST Engineering will be responsible for providing the communications and Scada systems, automatic fare collection system, platform screen doors, and signalling system. This project adds to the group’s smart mobility track record of more than 200 smart metro projects in some 50 global cities.

In Rio de Janeiro, ST Engineering’s smart utilities and infrastructure business is participating in one of the world’s largest single deployments of a city-wide public smart street light control project, serving as a technology partner to the Smart Luz consortium (Smart Luz) in the city’s public lighting public-private partnership (PPP) project.

It will deploy its Telematics Wireless T-Light Galaxy Smart Street Lighting solution with Agil IoT platform to connect 300,000 LED street lights across the city. The IoT platform also has the capability to manage more than 25,000 devices and sensors to enable wifi hotspots, waste management and traffic junction sensing for future smart city applications.

Work is underway and will last for a period of two years, with a 10-year operation and maintenance portion that comes with an option to extend for another eight years.

The Smart Luz consortium was awarded the Rio de Janeiro public lighting PPP concession to operate, maintain, expand and modernise the city’s public lighting infrastructure for a period of 20 years.

The Rio de Janeiro Public Lighting PPP is the first public lighting and smart city PPP in Brazil financed through secured sustainability notes guaranteed by the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), with Goldman Sachs acting as global coordinator, bookrunner, and sustainability bond structuring agent.

“The Rio de Janeiro Public Lighting project will have a transformational impact as well as long-lasting and continuous benefits for the sustainable development of the city”

“The Rio de Janeiro Public Lighting PPP project will be the largest integrated smart city deployment in Latin America, and will have a transformational impact as well as long-lasting and continuous benefits for the sustainable development of the city of Rio de Janeiro and its population,” said Yan Herreras Yambanis, principal of High-Trend Brazil and vice president of finance at Smart Luz.

“Smart Luz is excited to be working with ST Engineering as technology partner for its proven technology, reliability and depth of knowledge in the realm of smart cities. We see ST Engineering with its local set-up in Brazil as a strategic partner, given the long-term nature and potential of Smart Lighting PPPs in Brazil and the region.”

These projects add to ST Engineering’s global track record of around 700 smart city projects across 130 cities.

“We are delighted to serve as technology partner on these projects, lending our expertise and global experience in smart mobility and IoT to help our customers address their challenges to improve quality of life for their communities,” said Chew Men Leong, president of urban solutions at ST Engineering.

“Importantly, our solutions are helping cities pave their way to a more connected, resilient and sustainable future.”