Street Lighting - LEDs are Street Ahead
LED Street Lighting is now being used in many cities around the world including London, Mumbai, Shanghai and The City of Sydney who have installed a number of energy efficient LED street lights across the Sydney CBD as part of an LED street lighting trial.
The energy savings are potentially huge as The City of Sydney has over 20,000 streetlights and spent over $3.5m on power costs alone for these lights in 2009 and a further $2.0m on maintenance.
The cost of this energy could be dramatically reduced by up to 50 per cent saving millions of dollars and at the same time hugely reduce the maintenance and carbon emissions.
This LED Street Lighting trial was the first in Australia and has now been closely followed by Adelaide and Melbourne.
Not only has this trial and others been successful meeting all the required standards, Lux levels and light spread, the LED Street Lights have also been widely accepted by communities and council alike as aesthetics, energy use, operations and maintenance issues have all been vastly improved.
LED Street Lighting also solves the problem of excessive energy use, light pollution (both into the night sky and resident’s properties), and glare.
The types of conventional lighting than can be replaced by the LED lights include Incandescent, Fluorescent, High Pressure Mercury, High Pressure Sodium, Metal Halide, and Compact Fluorescent.
Around Australia alone, there are approximately 2 million streetlights costing $210 million per year and using 1035 Gigawatt hours of electricity. These conventional streetlights are responsible for 0.2% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions nearly 1.2 million tonnes.
With a longer lifespan, than conventional lighting plus the energy and maintenance saving, LED Street lighting is the way of the future and will soon become widely accepted.
