The City of Sydney, the first Australian city to replace all its street lighting with LEDs, has recently awarded new contracts for LEDs, smart controls, and a street lighting maintenance provider.
The City first deployed LEDs in 2009 and is now set to replace that first generation of LEDs. This follows a pattern set by other early LED adopters such as the City of Los Angeles. The business case for replacement is based on the additional energy savings possible with the latest generation of LEDs, their greater reliability and their longer expected life. The City has also cited a range of service-level and environmental benefits from an upgrade.
Sydney is one of the largest municipal managers of public lighting in Australia. It manages about 8,000 lights in the public domain fed by 200km of electrical cabling and a wide array of switchboards and other electrical assets. Of these, the City has about 6,775 street lights along with a further 1,245 lights in parks, gardens and on sportsfields. This is in addition to more than 10,500 street lights operated by Ausgrid within the City’s boundaries.
At the time of the City’s first major LED contracts in 2011, the predicted service life of the LEDs was 50,000 hours or just over 11 years with a warranty covering 10 years. This means that the first generation of LEDs deployed by the City have reached the end of their predicted life and are out of warranty.
Many of today’s LEDs have predicted service lives in excess of 100,000 hours including all those awarded contracts by the City. With regards to LED energy efficiency, this has continued to improve by about 4 lumens/Watt each year according to the International Energy Agency. This steady increase in efficiency has resulted in a more than doubling efficacy since 2010.
The City has awarded LED supply contracts to Signify, Schreder, Masson Manufacturing, and Traffic Technologies. The City is also taking the opportunity to rollout smart controls across all 8,000 lights on its network. This contract has been awarded to Schreder. The smart controls will be co-deployed as part of the City’s LED replacement program.
Harnleigh has been awarded the contract for public lighting and electrical maintenance. In addition to day-to-day maintenance work, they will be responsible for the deployment of the new LEDs, the smart controls and for collection of a wide variety of asset data to update the City’s Corporate Asset Management System.
Peter Shields, the City of Sydney’s Chief Engineer, said that “The City has benefited from the energy and cost savings and improved light quality from a large scale LED rollout for over 10 years. The forthcoming rollout will embed state of the art LED technology and the introduce smart lighting controls to our broad suite of lights. We expect to benefit through a significant further reduction in energy use, lower operational costs and improved performance and aesthetics. We will also have the ability to add sensors for a variety of smart city applications. It’s a great outcome!”
