LED street lighting

Hi, I’m Jervis Whitley. Today’s 29th of November, and you’re listening to WindFront, the weekly roundup of the Wind Industry from Australia and around the world. LED street lighting, or upgrading our old mercury vapour lamps to a newer technology. Now, an article by the Rocky Mountain Institute in USA discusses the situation where disruption is happening in street lighting of all places. So I’ll look at their findings and review the changes we’re making here in Australia.

In some jurisdictions, the council or roadways authority, they don’t own the street lights. Instead, they’re owned by the network, and the council pays an access fee and a flat energy usage charge for the street lighting all bundled into one. The problem arises with respect to a perverse incentive. The network has little incentive to upgrade lights to use a lower wattage or more efficient globes or technologies. The revenue comes at a time of low demand where there’s a perfect balance for the network. If they were to install a more efficient globe, then it would need to update the tariff and pass on the savings through the council, which doesn’t really make sense financially.

There’s a suggestion, and an example, that a public buyout of the street lighting from the network would yield a windfall over a period of 20 years for the councils there. Typically, they’ll issue a 20 year bond to fund the purchase, and in the example of a town called Union, in New York State, which saved around $13 million according to a 2008 study.

We run things a little differently here. In Australia, the poles are owned by the councils and roadways authorities, but they pay a maintenance fee and energy rate to the networks. So it’s the network’s responsibility to fix and maintain the street lighting, but the council’s responsibility to upgrade to new technology if that’s what they’d prefer.

There was a campaign in the last few years in Victoria that sought an upgrade of all Victoria’s street lighting to newer efficient technologies, but not LED, compact fluorescent was the technology they’d like. And we predominantly have mercury vapour lamps, which are around about 80 watt, but the newer technologies can be half or quarter that energy use for the same light level. So how much would we save? The campaign website suggests about $7 million bucks each year. Where I have an issue with that number, and here’s the way I’m calculating these costs.

Now, the campaign website says that there are 330,000 street lights installed in Victoria, and each, let’s assume, has the 80 watt globe installed, and they run for about 10 hours every night. The electricity rate, let’s say it’s about 6 cents a kilowatt hour. So that calculation gives an annual bill of about $5.7 million. And a $7 million yearly saving doesn’t really make sense, given that it would mean that the network would be paying us for the privilege of running the lights. We could save about half that amount, I reckon, or maybe about $3 million annually instead of the 7 million quoted. So the campaign said that the upgrade would cost about $120 million total, or about $360 per light, which would take about 40 years to earn back. So the Baillieu government pledged $20 million towards this goal, but reneged in 2012.

So the economic benefits are really slight, which is why the USA and trials in New Zealand aren’t focussing on the economic benefit alone. Instead, they’re taking the opportunity to install sensors on the poles to monitor traffic, pedestrians and seismic activity. So next time you’re walking through the streets of Christchurch in New Zealand, just know that the street lights are possibly monitoring your pedestrian traffic.

So that’s all from me this week. The weekly top three, I won’t be able to cover, but I’ll cover that again next week. Until I see you next time, keep buying those green electrons.