Car Park Light Switch-off Leaves Call-in Councillor In The Dark About Savings

Posted on 04. Nov, 2009 by Ross in Press Releases, Public Facilities, Transport

Devon County Council should have been basking in the glow of ecological enlightenment this week, after announcing on Monday that they were turning off their street car park lighting from 12:30am-5:30am in order to reduce energy bills and carbon emissions.

Instead, a clueless councillor on a local BBC radio show was left floundering when asked about the financial savings that the new policy would bring.

When asked by BBC Radio Cornwall’s Laurence Reed what Devon County Council’s motivations were behind turning off the street lighting in around 30 car parks in the council’s jurisdiction, East Devon District Council spokesperson Peter House declared that the prime factors were to dissuade boys racers and vandalism. He then added that the council would save ‘quite a lot of money’ as well as reducing light pollution.

When prompted regarding one of the other reasons that the council’s press releases had cited - saving the environment - the councillor failed to explain effectively, adding ‘We don’t need it looking like Las Vegas’!

The interview then turned to the bottom line, with a somewhat unexpected response:

Laurence: In hard cash terms, how much money can your council save

Peter: I have no idea

When pressed further, the fumbling councillor muttered ‘I haven’t worked it out’ along with burbling for a while about it simply ‘just making sense’.

This poor display caused David Bone, managing director of Cornwall-based energy-saving technology company Somar International Ltd, to phone in and defend the car park lighting policy after a torrent of safety concerns had been piled on top of the floundering councillor and a hand-waving environmentalist.

David Bone routinely champions the business case for energy saving, and Somar International has supplied multi-storey car parks Eluma lighting in order to cut costs and emissions. By using intelligent sensors and daylight dimming, Eluma minimises the light usage to a minimum during both the day and night.

However, the first point made was to answer the security concerns raised by members of the public. A normally-lit car park would appear no different to passing police officers, but a car park lit by intelligent sensor-enabled lighting would tell passing policemen whether or not the facility was currently occupied, causing them to take a further look if the lights were on.

Again the conversation turned to cost but, unlike the councillor, David Bone was able to reveal that the payback period for Eluma car park lighting installations was typically 12-24 months, with the lights paying for themselves from the massive energy savings made.

For the record, the Devon County Council car park lighting policy will use a simple switch-off timing system rather than any intelligent sensing, which despite the cheapness of the solution (£20-£30 per light) will take three whole years to pay for itself.

Part-night lighting - which is how the council refers to the switch-off system - has the potential to save 6% of the council’s carbon emissions if scaled across the whole county’s street lighting and save up to £450,000 annually in lighting costs and another £43,000 in avoiding carbon credits in the forthcoming CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme. The switch-over for these car parks, however, is but a small drop in Devon’s lighting ocean.