The tipping point for LED street-lighting?

Lux Magazine reports that The Green Investment Bank wants Britain’s streetlights to be 100 per cent LED by 2020 – and it’s putting its money where its mouth is-

Two hundred million pounds. That’s how much the Green Investment Bank reckons the UK could save every year by switching all its streetlights to LED.

In terms of carbon emissions, the impact of a nationwide LED switchover would be like taking 330,000 cars off the roads. And it would pretty much wipe out the need for the London Array offshore wind farm. So why hasn’t it happened yet?

The main reason is, predictably, money. The capital that councils need to kick off a streetlight upgrade is a major obstacle.

That’s where the Green Investment Bank comes in. Set up 18 months ago, the government-owned 

GIB has £3.8 billion of its own capital to play with, and is helping to attract billions more in private investment to support projects. So far it has committed a total of £1.3 billion to 27 projects covering energy efficiency as well as waste, bioenergy and wind power, with private money increasing the figure to £4.6 billion.

Now the GIB has set its sights on the UK’s seven million streetlights – many of which are over 40 years old. Its new Green Loan service aims to remove the upfront capital cost of an LED upgrade, with councils repaying the money from the savings they make on their electricity bills.

‘Although the technology is proven and the savings are fairly well understood, you need capital to do this,’ said Gregor Paterson-Jones, in charge of energy efficiency at the GIB. ‘When we’ve been out talking to people, they’ve said, we understand this, we’d like to do it, but we just don’t have the budget.

‘Over the past five years we have data to prove that energy savings can be met, and manufacturers are able to give warranties for a long period of time for the performance of those lights. So the complex structures where you transfer risk are not necessarily required, which keeps the cost of financing down.’

As for who supplies the lights and the products that are used, the GIB will leave that up to each local authority.

The GIB’s Green Loan isn’t the first scheme of its kind – the Carbon Trust and the Green Deal have offered similar schemes based on repaying loans from reduced bills, and a number of lighting suppliers have come up with financing packages too. But it’s the first one in the UK aimed particularly at street lighting, and the bank has access to huge amounts of money.

Currently less than 10 per cent of Britain’s streetlights are LED – but there’s no reason we can’t aim to make that 100 per cent by 2020, Paterson-Jones says.

Local authority street lighting managers were recently invited to join MPs at a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Lighting Group, to hear about what the bank has to offer.

The first council to benefit from GIB funding for streetlights is Glasgow, which is about to embark on the second phase of a major upgrade as part of its Future Cities programme.

One thousand of Glasgow’s streetlights were upgraded to LED in a pilot project in 2012, and the next phase of the project will target 10,000 more. Over 18 years, the city believes it will make a net saving of more than £8 million from the upgrade.

Brian Devlin, who is in charge of environmental services at Glasgow City Council, said he was ‘delighted’ to be the first local authority to get Green Investment Bank backing. ‘If I’m asked to make a saving, I want to make a saving around supply chain and energy rather than going and reducing schools, social work, front-line service,’ he said.

Joan Walley MP, who co-chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Lighting Group, praised the Glasgow project and called the GIB’s Green Loan a ‘game-changer’. ‘We want to make sure as many local councils as possible can do all they can to access that funding, because when trying to improve street lighting, it always, always, always comes down to finance.’

John Jeffrey of Cheshire West and Chester Council agreed: ‘Finance is the number one obstacle. When your revenue pot shrinks, that makes it more difficult to maintain your borrowing limits and street lighting is not seen as a priority for investment. The Green Investment Bank might unlock that door,’ he said.

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