Adaptive lighting at EV charging station delivers 67% energy savings in the first 2 months alone

Summary: Ignitis deployed adaptive EV charging station lighting at its Vėjukai site along the A1 highway, where, over the first two months of operation, the site consumed 67% less electricity. The installation shows how IoT-based control can reduce the operating costs of charging infrastructure while improving the experience for drivers stopping to charge their electric cars at night.

 

Location:

Vejukai, A1 highway, Lithuania

 

Hardware:

 

Software:

Lighting management platform HORIZON

 

The challenge

EV charging stations along major transit roads operate on a fundamentally different rhythm than urban streets. Traffic arrives in unpredictable bursts, with long quiet stretches between them, and the site must be fully lit the moment a driver pulls in, and at any hour.

The conventional answer is an astronomical time profile: luminaires switch on at dusk, step down to a reduced level in the dark hours, and increase before dawn. It is a reasonable default, but it the schedule runs identically whether the area is full or empty, and on a highway site it’s often empty most of the night. That creates several problems:

  • Scheduled light burning through hours when no vehicle is on site, because the luminaire has no way of knowing
  • Lighting load added directly to a site whose entire commercial purpose is selling energy efficiently
  • Fixed schedules unable to respond to the irregular arrival patterns typical of highway charging stops
  • No visibility into how much energy the lighting itself was consuming
  • Manual intervention required for any seasonal or operational adjustment at a remote roadside location
  • Light spilling into the surrounding rural darkness on a schedule, causing light pollution

An astronomical profile also sets a limit on how much can be saved: the deepest night-time illumination level still has to be bright enough for a driver who might arrive, so the reduced level stays relatively high. For an energy company, an area lit to that level over an empty site is a visible contradiction. Ignitis needed a system that would deliver excellent visibility whenever a driver was present, and consume almost nothing when the site was empty.

 

The solution: adaptive EV charging station lighting

Ignitis partnered with Lusety to implement an adaptive lighting system built around the site’s actual usage pattern:

  • Individual LIGHTWAVE and LIGHTWAVE-LTE luminaire controllers providing fixture-level control across the charging area
  • LUMAWISE Motion sensors detecting arriving vehicles and pedestrians in real time, triggering immediate full illumination
  • Adaptive logic holding the site at a low baseline level between arrivals, with instant response the moment activity is detected
  • HORIZON management platform providing remote monitoring, configuration, and consumption data from a single interface

The result is a site that behaves as though it is fully lit for every driver who uses it, while spending most of the night drawing a fraction of the power.

 

Results & benefits

67% energy savings in the first two months

Measured consumption over the first two months was 67% below the calculated baseline.

High brightness on arrival, every time

Motion detection brings the forecourt to full output as a vehicle approaches, so drivers charging at night find a well-lit, clearly legible site. The saving comes entirely from the hours when nobody is there.

Lower operating costs per charging session

Because lighting load is one of the fixed overheads of a charging site, reducing it improves the underlying economics of the station without touching charging hardware or pricing.

Remote oversight of a roadside location

Through HORIZON, Ignitis charging station can be monitored and reconfigured without dispatching anyone to a location on a major highway, reducing both cost and roadside exposure for staff.

Consumption data

The platform makes lighting energy use visible in its own right, so it can be tracked, benchmarked against other sites, and optimized on evidence rather than assumption.

Automatic seasonal adjustment

Operating hours shift with Lithuania’s wide seasonal swing in daylight without anyone changing a setting, keeping the system efficient through both long winter nights and short summer ones.

Reduced light spill into a rural setting

Holding the site at a low baseline between arrivals limits unnecessary light emission into the surrounding darkness, while still leaving the station clearly visible to passing traffic.

 

Looking ahead

Ignitis EV charging station lighting installation is an early but clear indication of what presence-based control offers charging infrastructure specifically. Highway sites have exactly the usage profile this technology is built for—intense, short bursts of activity separated by long empty periods—and the wider the gap between those bursts, the more a schedule-driven profile leaves on the table.