Corpn to replace all street lamps with LEDs by March ’18

Buoyed with the economical benefits and efficiency of replacing street lamps with LED lamps, the Trichy Corporation has planned to replace sodium vapour lamps, metal halide lamps and high-mast lights with LEDs. The civic body had replaced around 37,000 street tube lights with LEDs in the last one year and managed to bring down annual power consumption by 41 per cent.
The energy efficient project with an initial outlay of Rs 30.29 crore from corporation fund aims to automate the operation and maintenance (O&M) of LED street lights to overcome constraints involved in manual O&M across all the 65 wards.
The move came following a study conducted by the civic body in 2014 that shed light on practical difficulties in operation and maintenance of street lights including switching on and off the street lights on time. The study also revealed that about 50 per cent of the overall electricity charges of Trichy Corporation was found spent on operating the street lights. Tackling the issue, pursuing a Public Private Partnership (PPP) model in 2014 through a private agency, investment-grade energy audit (IGA) was conducted by the corporation on existing street lamps for understanding the changes required to ensure better luminescence and conservation of resources in operating the street lamps.


As an outcome of the study, pursuing the parameters mentioned as per the Bureau of India Standards (BIS) such as as apt spacing and arrangements of lamp poles, corporation officials said that around 36,547 street lights were converted to LED lights.
"The energy conservation project envisaging the conversion of a majority street lights to LED has helped us to bring down annual electricity consumption by 41.89 per cent. The 40 watts tube lights were converted into energy efficient 20 watt LED lamps, and we also have plans to convert sodium vapour lamps to 90 watt LED lamps to further save electricity charges," said S Amuthavalli, Trichy Corporation city engineer.
Post the IGA, works are said to be in progress to establish a centralised control monitoring centre (CCMC) at the corporation's main office to link all the voltage controllers, street light controllers and individual lamp monitoring devices under a single cluster for better supervision and grievance redressal.
Similarly, efforts are being taken to incorporate geographical information system (GIS) with CCMC to spot the location of malfunctioning LED lamps to rectify the same at the earliest. Corporation sources said that the energy conservation project plans to convert all lights under Trichy Corporation jurisdiction including highways into LEDs will be completed by March 2018.

Source:https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/trichy/corpn-to-replace-all-street-lamps-with-leds-by-march-18/articleshow/61801038.cms