London to Receive £1.5m for Air Sensor Network Project
25-03-2021 | By Robin Mitchell
Recently, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Mayor of London announced a joint venture which will see £1.5m invested in creating an air quality sensor network. What challenges does air pollution cause, what will the sensor array allow for, and does the price of the project make sense?
Challenges Posed by Air Pollution
London has gone under drastic changes since the early 1800’s and is no longer the smog-ridden city it once was. However, despite the large-scale removal of factories and restrictions on vehicles, the sheer size of London and its popularity results in a poorer quality of air than the surrounding countryside.
Understanding the issues caused by poor air quality can be challenging, and not obvious at first sight. Anyone who has travelled to London will most likely not notice any difference in the air quality, in fact, those that live there won’t notice any large smog clouds or filth on their windows. But despite that, air pollution still causes a multitude of problems which, if not addressed, can lead to loss of life.
London Councils published statistics on the estimated number of deaths caused by air pollution. It is believed that poor air quality leads to 9,400 premature deaths each year with a total cost of £1.4 to £3.7 billion to the health service. In the past, air pollution could kill through sheer suffocation of those with sensitive airways (such as asthma), but modern deaths from air pollution arise from increase lung cancer risks.
Of course, it’s not just human health that is affected; even the environment suffers poorly from polluted air. Increased CO2 levels do help plants grow bigger, but air pollution is not about CO2, it is about particulates such as soot and noxious fumes such as NO2. These all can contribute to stunted plant growth as well as harming wildlife in a similar fashion to humans.
London to Receive £1.5m for Air Sensor Network Project
Measures are being taken to try and reduce the levels of air pollution in London. While many cities around the world suffer from similar problems, London does not help itself with its tight layout and small roads which sees cars stuck in traffic for long periods of time. The inability of wind to get into the inner city between buildings can see pollution linger around and remain stuck.
While solutions to solving the air pollution continue, the City of London has recently been awarded £1.5m for an air sensor network project that aims to monitor air pollution in real-time. The project, funded by Bloomberg philanthropists and the Mayor of London will see the installation of 195 air quality sensors around the city.
The project, which has already begun, will see the sensors mounted in key locations such as hospitals, schools, and local authorities, and this data will be streamed to the cloud. From there, citizens can use the Breathe London website to see the data live which allows individuals to avoid areas of high pollution. It is hoped that the use of avoidance will help to reduce rates of premature deaths by giving people the opportunity to avoid heavily affected areas.
Is the project overpriced?
While £1.5m is very cheap for any government project, the use of 195 sensors and a website demonstrating live data leads to some questions regarding the price and feasibility of this project. The project aims to install 195 sensors which would put each sensor at a cost of £7,500 per sensor.
This price goes down when considering hosting services and staff, and as such assuming that 10 engineers are hired to install the sensors (a one-time operation), it can be assumed that such a project would take three months (6 sensors per day per engineer). With an average salary of £35,000 such a project would put each sensor at £6,700 per sensor. Taking the project further, including several senior staff to such a project and IT could see an estimated yearly staff cost of £300,000. Even then, each sensors price would only fall to around £5,000.
The full budget may not be utilised, but it is more than likely that the project will be considered an achievement when it installs half the stated sensors at the end of the budget. It should be stated that the purpose of this basic economic evaluation is not to discourage the use of IoT in city environments to monitor air pollution but to put into perspective the price difference between IoT sensor which generally cost less than £50 to the cost per sensor when run by the government.
Such a sensor project could arguably be implemented by a few hobbyists with an interest in the environment and IoT at a much lower cost. Furthermore, such a project could easily be expanded to make traffic re-routing suggestions to try and limit air pollution on key roads, provide real-time alerts to people’s devices, and be combined with AI to try and learn links between air pollution and how it interacts with its surroundings.
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