The Penrith Local Government Area (LGA) will be a lot brighter over the coming months thanks to Penrith City Council and Endeavour Energy’s partnership to upgrade the non-LED fitted residential streetlights with energy reducing efficient LED fittings across the community as part of the “Lighting the Future Together” program.
The changeover will see over 9,800 non-LED fitted streetlights across the LGA upgraded, which is expected to result in a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions across Penrith.
“Lighting the Future Together” is the third stage of the “Light Years Ahead” program, which first successfully launched in 2015 with over 140,000 streetlights in the Endeavour Energy network changed over to LED fittings.
It was followed by further success in 2019 which saw Penrith City Council contribute $3.3 million in funding to upgrade 7,738 residential streetlights across Penrith.
Penrith Mayor Tricia Hitchen said that the streetlight upgrade forms part of Council’s plan to continue moving towards a more sustainable future.
“Streetlighting is responsible for almost half of the energy consumed by Council and presents a significant opportunity for energy efficient projects such as this one,” Cr Hitchen said.
“We are proud of the long-term benefits the LED streetlights have provided for the community, including a significant reduction of 77% of our greenhouse gas emissions and an approximate annual energy saving of $148,000 since 2015. It is expected to save more than $13 million in energy costs over the next 20 years,” she said.
Penrith’s current streetlight network consists of 20,619 luminaires where 9,808 are still fitted with non-LED fittings. This program will see those remaining lights changed to LED lights over the next few months.
The upgrade to a full LED streetlighting network is expected to save a total of 3,424,623 kWh per annum, equating to 2,774 tonnes of carbon dioxide reduced across the community.
By upgrading these streetlights to LED fittings, the new lights will have greater uniformity of light across and along the street, better colour rendering and visibility, less depreciation of the light output over time, greater reliability, and lower maintenance costs as the new lights have a longer lifespan of approximately 20 years.
Endeavour Energy’s crew are installing these new lights across the Penrith LGA. The changeover involves a single elevated work platform with two to three crew members and typically takes less than 10 minutes to replace a streetlight.
The works are scheduled during times of low traffic, with any disruption to traffic flow in streets being minimal. All cars can remain parked on streets while this project is undertaken.
For more information about the streetlight upgrade, visit penrith.city/streetlights
Photo captions:
LED1: An Endeavour Energy crew member replaces the non-LED fittings for LED fittings in streetlights across Penrith.
LED2: LED lights illuminate a residential street in Werrington County.
Photos courtesy of Endeavour Energy
