Current first started the conversation with the City of Schenectady all the way back in 2015, when we entered into an agreement to deploy 14 CityIQ nodes in the heart of the city. Shortly after the CityIQ node installation, a manhole cover exploded, and the city immediately asked Current to recover video footage from the incident for investigation purposes. Luckily no one was hurt, but the city recognized the power of the data we were collecting.

Simultaneous to our pilot in the city, National Grid was awarded a $6.7M grant through the State of New York's Reforming Energy Vision demonstration initiative. National Grid's strategy was to use these funds to deploy and evaluate advanced street lighting platforms that would animate the market for smart cities technologies and services like City IQ.

Fast forward to the middle of 2019, the Current team has clocked in over 150 hours with the stakeholders of the projects including National Grid and the City of Schenectady to bring this order home. We are now in a year-long bake-off, occupying zone B of the city with our full suite of outdoor solutions including ~1200 Roadway LED fixtures and 1200 LightGrid nodes, while our competitors are in zone A. The winner gets to move into the remaining four zones of Schenectady (equal to 4800 streetlights) and more importantly, establishes favor with National Grid to be their preferred smart cities partner for their 454,000 streetlights across New England, so it's essential that we execute this deal flawlessly. Let the battle begin!

This wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Parm Girn, Denise Pucilowski, Viktor Varga, Mark Wilbur, Brian Cook, Jim Benson, Mike Bertin, Seb Magnan, Chris Auger, Travis Lynch, RJ Darling, Austin Ashe and Colleen Calhoun.