STREET LIGHTING TRANSFORMATION PROJECT

Lincolnshire County Council

THE BRIEF

Lincolnshire County Council (LCC) manages street lighting to make sure it is efficient, sustainable and relevant across the whole county. Until recently, it is anticipated it cost approximately £5m per year to operate the County Council’s 68,000 street lights, with almost £3m of this spent on electricity.

Becoming increasingly aware of their carbon footprint, growing maintenance costs and electricity usage, the council launched a year-long street light transformation project to find solutions that would help them to achieve their efficiency and sustainability objectives.  Marwood were delighted to partner with the Council and their installation contractor to help them achieve these goals. 

THE SOLUTION

Working in collaboration with highways maintenance contractor, Kier, and in consultation with Lincolnshire Community Safety Partnership, the Lincolnshire Road Safety Partnership and local Police, careful consideration was given to identify appropriate lighting and usage across the different locations and settings in which they were to be installed and operated.

After analysing potential changes in the use of dimming, part-night lighting and LEDs when changing from more traditional light sources in local areas, and taking into account local crime and road safety concerns and statistics, the following lighting solution was recommended:

• To convert approximately 17,000 lights to LED, reducing energy usage by 12.5m kwh per year.
• Introduce ‘part-night’ lighting to approximately 42,000 street lights, mainly in residential areas, where street lights switch on at dusk and stay on until midnight, switch off during the early hours and then power up again at 6am (providing light levels require it to- more so in the darker winter months) until dawn.
• Switch off approximately 1,000 lights on roads away from built up areas, following careful assessment by Lincolnshire Road Safety Partnership.

Our specialist lighting sales team specified the range of products required and liaised with the manufacturers and contractor to ensure the correct items were available and delivered on time to meet the project programme. We were able to achieve this by utilising our own dedicated in-house logistics and transport department, rather than relying on a third-party and storing product in our own facility to ensure we forward held stock that would be required in months to come thereby negating any fears of supply chain disruption impacting on the programme.

Our full-service capability proved invaluable, as last-minute changes to the timing parameters of lighting in some locations meant that photocells had to be reconfigured at short notice. Our team collected, arranged re-programming and delivered the reworked photocells back to the contractor without causing undue disruption to the project completion.