Edinburgh City Council has unveiled plans to begin a £24.5 million roll-out of brighter, energy-efficient street lights.

The installation, which will start this month, is expected to save Scotland’s capital city £54 million over the next 20 years. The decision to roll out the new lamps follows a successful pilot project in 2014, which saw 7,000 obsolete lanterns in Edinburgh replaced with LED lights.

The LED lights give off a clearer light and have a considerably longer life-span (20 years) than the current lights, which last just two to four years. Edinburgh City Council said that the brighter light and new technology will also improve community safety by enhancing CCTV images and allowing light levels to be varied.

Currently, the council’s energy bill for just running the city’s 65,000 street lamps sits at £3 million per annum and, as energy costs continue to increase, the current lamps are swiftly becoming obsolete, costlier and harder to maintain.

New Upgrade Will Help to Ease Street Lighting Staff Workload

Along with the new lamps, a dynamic street lighting monitoring and control system (CMS) will also be installed, giving much more centralised control over the city’s lighting.

The CMS is equipped with real-time monitoring, enabling it to identify and report faults, which will remove the need for street lighting staff to undertake night-time scouting work to identify faults. In turn, these improvements could reduce the number of residents’ complaints about faulty fixtures and broken lights.

Councillor Lesley MacInnes said: “Residents in the pilot areas for the new lights overwhelmingly said that they preferred the crisper, brighter light to the orangey glow of the old inefficient street lights. As well as saving the city millions of pound, replacing the old lights will help cut our CO2 emissions in Edinburgh and comply with Scottish Government energy efficiency legislation.”

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