Tauranga City Council is making good progress with the streetlight replacement programme. In March this year council started replacing approximately 7000 streetlights in residential areas with light-emitting diodes (LED). First up were Matua, Bellevue, Brookfield, Judea, Otumoetai and Bethlehem. On 17 June 2019, the 1000th LED light was installed in Bethlehem. The rest of the Tauranga residential areas will follow in the coming months with the programme expected to be complete by early 2020.

Martin Parkes, Acting General Manager Infrastructure, says:
'We have clear direction from our Council to convert our streetlights to LED and this milestone is a good opportunity to share with our community what they can expect of this project. There is no doubt that the switch to LED is a necessary one. However, besides a long list of advantages, there is also one disadvantage that we want to inform people about to avoid surprises.”

While most of Tauranga's streetlights are quite standard, some of the streets have decorative poles with different types of fixtures that cannot easily be retrofitted with a LED bulb.

'We will have to make some alterations to those poles which may change the look of the streetlights. For example, some ornamental luminaires will be replaced with a standard LED fitting and light. This is a compromise to ensure those streets also get the benefits of LED lighting.”

The advantages of LED streetlighting are:

• Less energy use – with reductions up to 75% compared to the current lighting consumption (depending on which street the existing street light is situated)
• Fewer carbon emissions – supporting environmental considerations
• Environmentally friendly lamps – as opposed to Mercury Vapour lamps, which contain the toxic metal mercury
• Less upward light waste – LED lights are directional and aim lighting downwards, as opposed to the sodium lamps which emit light upwards into the atmosphere, LEDs will promote ‘dark sky' by avoiding light pollution
• Less maintenance requirements – LEDs typically last 100,000 burn hours, roughly equating to 20 years of life, while conventional sodium lights need to be changed every 3-4 years
• Improved level of service to residents of Tauranga – by creating a stable lighting network that requires less maintenance
• More acute colour rendering – colours can be seen easier at night making people easier to be seen
• Instantaneous response – LED lamps can be directly switched to full output, whereas standard sodium lights take a while to warm up
• Warrantees – Council's recently procured LED lights come with a 10-year warrantee
• Whole-of-life cost – due to some points above, plus LED lighting having come down in price significantly, the whole-of-life cost for LED far outweighs sodium lighting
• Dimmable lamps – the LED lights Council has purchased have an in-built controller so the lights can be dimmed using a smart control system. This will help decrease the operational costs further.
• Addressable – each LED light that has a controller, can be monitored for faults, taking maintenance from reactive to proactive

Martin Parkes says that lighting on Council's streets currently represents approximately a quarter of all of Council's overall energy use.

'The LED rollout is expected to save almost 2 GWh of energy per year, making a significant reduction to our overall 27 GWh consumption. It will also help to save 250 tonnes of CO2 every year.”

The upgrade to LED is co-funded by the NZ Transport Agency with NZTA paying for 85% of the project cost. This project has an overall 10-year return on investment, taking energy and maintenance into account.

Find out when work is expected in your area.