The emancipation of the Prague City Hall, which is gradually cutting itself away from the management of urban technologies of a private company, continues. City company Technologie hl. The city of Prague has been operating for two years, during which time it has taken over the management of the complete lighting of the Czech capital – a total of 135,000 lamps.

Now she received a welcome gift. For 10 million, it opened a central control room in Holešovice, where operators receive reports of failures of all public lamps in the city and another 4,500 cameras. “We will receive 2,000 such announcements a month,” says Tomáš Jílek, the company’s CEO.

In the future, the city company from Holešovice would also like to supervise cameras in tunnels, section radars and traffic lights. It only solves their functionality and power supply, it does not care about data.

While in the case of cameras, operators immediately detect a fault on the monitors, in the case of light failures, they rely on reports from citizens, or police, paramedics or firefighters. As soon as they receive such a report, they will pass it on to the repair platoon, which will go out into the field. “We strive to connect to the switching station for lighting in the future, and thus oversee the specific light without anyone having to tell us that it is not lit,” says Jílek.

Eltodo-Citelum used to take care of the Prague lighting, the long-term cooperation ended in 2016. This was followed by a tender in which the company Eltodo Osvetlenie won. However, the results of the tender returned to the Office for the Protection of Competition, so Prague went to a city company, which simply entrusted the lighting administration.

She is investing heavily in the company, she has bought lifting platforms for her, and therefore she is pushing to take care of other related systems in addition to lighting – such as cameras. The city boasts that, unlike the contract with Eltod, it has the management of its key infrastructure firmly in its hands. He is more cautious about financial balance sheets.

The city’s plan to use part of the city lamps as chargers for electric cars in the future is interesting. According to the plan of councilor Jan Chabr, there should be up to five thousand of them. “Now we are preparing the whole plan for discussion at the city council and next year we would like to build the first pilot chargers at the lamp in Vinohrady,” says Chabr. However, the whole intention is complicated by the fact that the current supply to the lamp would not feed the car charger. It is therefore necessary to introduce capacitive power cables into selected luminaires.

While Eltodo has collected around 160 million a year in recent years, Technologie hl. The city is to receive 200 million crowns next year. Both the city and the company explain this by, among other things, investing in the replacement of old sodium lamps with modern LEDs. It should also undergo major modernization by lighting selected monuments.