SMART STREETS Mansi Gandhi
With the convergence of lighting and the Internet of Things (IoT), today’s outdoor lighting systems deliver benefits beyond illumination. They light up streets, parks and other public areas as well as provide connectivity and play a vital role in smart city initiatives.
C
ities and councils around the world are replacing their legacy streetlights with LED streetlights. The upgrades help councils improve energy efficiency, safety and security, and reduce electricity consumption and maintenance costs. Intelligent streetlights can also provide several other benefits such as seamless mobile wireless 4G LTE connectivity, improved traffic monitoring and air pollution detection among others. There are currently more than 300 million streetlights around the world, and the figure is expected to reach 350 million by 2025. LED and smart streetlights are projected to reach 84% and 37% of the total streetlight market, respectively, by 2025, according to research and consulting firm northeast group. In Australia, around 300,000 street lights have already been replaced. This amounts to around 2 million tonnes of greenhouse gas abatement. To get some insights on the current status and future prospects of the street lighting market in Australia, ECD spoke to Alexi Lynch from Ironbark Sustainability, a specialist consultancy that has assisted many local governments to plan for and implement lighting changeovers for both council-owned and distributor-owned lights. How many street lights are being replaced in Australia? There are 2.3 million street lights in Australia, so while we’ve come a long way there are still over 2 million to be replaced. However, around 100 councils across Australia have now implemented energy-efficient street lighting projects so we’ve come an incredibly long way.
20 ECD SOLUTIONS - MARCH/APRIL 2016
The vast majority of energy-efficient street lights changed over are in Victoria where 68 of Victoria’s 79 councils have completed bulk changeover projects or will have completed them by June 2016. NSW is also making significant progress in this area. The Western Sydney Light Years Ahead project is the new ‘gold standard’ for councils in NSW with an accelerated rollout of 13,000 LEDs throughout nine councils in the region already completed as the councils look at next steps. In Queensland, Brisbane City Council has completed the biggest project for a single council by changing 25,000 lights to 42 W CFLs and they are now investigating plans to install LEDs on a large scale. Ipswitch has changed over 2000 LEDs. In Tasmania, around 5000 lights are being changed in Hobart and Glenorchy. We could see some major changes with Tasmanian councils now able to access the Municipal Association of Victoria (MAVs) standing procurement panel of approved street lights. This will save Tassie councils hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours in internal procurement resourcing alone as they can fast-track purchasing of the LEDs themselves without having to go out to tender or quote. Essentially, this has already been done for them by the MAV and the Local Government Association of Tasmania (LGAT) on their behalf. In South Australia, there have been no ‘bulk changes’ apart from the capital City of Adelaide, but councils are actively taking a more collaborative approach that has paid off elsewhere.
www.ecdonline.com.au