By Paul Hemsley

Baw Baw Shire Council has revealed plans to test new street lighting based on light-emitting diode (LED) technology as an alternative to existing mercury vapour street lamps that present a toxic waste disposal challenge at the end of their life.

The council will conduct a two year trial to replace traditional 80 watt (W) mercury vapour street lamps with LEDs in the Burke Street Park section of the Linear Park Trail in Warragul, a move that could improve energy efficiency by as much as 60 per cent.

The scheme to test greener lighting is intended to test the business case for a wider replacement of 3740 traditional lamps using data from the trial.
 
While there are clear environmental benefits, Baw Baw Shire Council environment coordinator, Raj Manihar, said the process of buying and installing the LED lamps isn’t [initially] cheaper than traditional mercury lighting because the latter is an older and more mature technology.

Mr Manihar said if an 80W lamp lasts for five to seven years, the new technology may go as high as 15 years potentially making the cost of running and maintaining the LED lamps cheaper over the long term.

The relatively low cost and power consumption of LED technology has seen it become a staple in devices ranging from battery powered torches to digital televisions.
 
Despite the rise of consumer LED, the Lighting Council of Australia (LCA) told Government News that a mercury vapour lamps are very stable technology with a well-established performance history.
 
A concern of the industry group is the potential risk exposure buyers in a market that is potentially saturated with substandard products that sometimes lack testing and certification.

To deal with the issue, the LCA has introduced a certification scheme to help purchasers of LED products, which is so far the only one of its kind in Australia.

LCA chief executive, Bryan Douglas, said that while LED is a rapidly developing technology which has recently come a long way “it is still a case of buyer beware”.

“In the LED market in Australia, there is a lot of rubbish, a lot of immature product; LED standards are relatively immature and that makes purchasing these products somewhat difficult – but there is some excellent product available,” Mr Douglas said.

Lighting Council of Australia technical manager, Owen Manley said LED is actually great for street lighting applications.

“But you’re got to be really careful, you’ve got to do your homework. Don’t just let a salesman turn up and say these are great, pull out what ever you’ve got and put these up because they might actually bite you,” Mr Manley said.

According to Mr Manley, major suppliers like Ausgrid actually install the LEDs rather than the councils themselves, leaving the councils to pick up the tab and have very little say in the type of light fitting that’s actually installed.

This can potentially result in councils not having the expertise because of unfamiliarity with an LED product that has two or three generations of design.

Mr Manley said traditional lights are easy to report and fix because they flash and “go out”, whereas LED is more likely to catastrophically fail. This could make replacing the light and the lamp fitting a more expensive exercise.

“It works that way because councils don’t have the manpower, the expertise or the equipment to actually manage the street lighting themselves, whereas the big supplier authorities know what they’re doing and someone’s got to pay for it,” Mr Manley said.