Lighting currently accounts for nearly 6 percent of global CO2 emissions, generating almost 2 billion tons of the greenhouse gas each year.
To halt this trend, the Climate Group (an international organization working for a low-carbon future), recently published a report outlining the non-technical barriers to the widespread adoption of LED street lights around the world. These range from a lack of municipal funding for upgrades, complex ownership of lighting networks, and the unfortunate experience of some early adopters whose newly installed LEDs were simply unreliable.
While many of the barriers can be solved by political means, ABB has made a significant contribution to solving reliability issues with the introduction of a low-cost compact device that protects LEDs from the damaging effects of lightning strikes or other power surges through the grid.
The surge-protection devices (SPDs) can be installed in pairs at strategic points in the streetlight power supply network where they can block or short-out unwanted voltage spikes in the power supply. As soon as one of the two devices reaches the end of its useful life, the other takes over, sending out an alarm to the operator warning that the front-line protection device needs replacing. The replacement is quick and easy – the engineers don’t even need to cut the power.
In addition to improving reliability, our SPDs can be fitted with motion detectors and weather monitors. That means they can automatically adjust the lighting they deliver (and consequently the power they consume) depending on how dark it is and whether anyone is around to need the light.
Despite a growing urbanized world population, carbon emissions from street lighting are set to fall if we can remove non-technical barriers to adoption. According to The Climate Group’s report, if the world switched to LED lighting, a global saving of 735 million tons of CO2 emissions could be achieved each year (1), that’s equivalent to the total annual emissions of the UK and Spain, combined. With ABB’s surge protectors keeping LED lighting safe from surges, the world could count on a brighter future.
1 https://www.se4all.org/energyefficiencyplatform/lighting/