Southern Lights Street Lighting Project

For more than three years, Southern Lights NSW has been working on behalf of 41 councils in Southern and Central NSW to improve public lighting across the region, in conjunction with Essential Energy.

The project is a collaborative initiative across the Canberra Region Joint Organisation, RAMJO, Central NSW Joint Organisation, REROC, Broken Hill, Balranald and Wentworth councils.

To date, more than 106,000 LED street lights have been installed on residential and main roads across rural and regional NSW.

The massive rollout is understood to be the largest in Australia and is eventually expected to grow to more than 160,000 lights.

In the Southern Lights NSW region, this includes over 50,000 LEDs installed to date (about 2/3 of all the lighting managed by Essential Energy across the Southern Lights NSW region).

Councils in the Southern Lights NSW region are already saving over $3.2 million a year in energy and maintenance costs for these lights. Energy and greenhouse gas emissions savings have been an average of 50 % while improving lighting across the region.

These savings are in addition to the substantive price reductions achieved in the last pricing review by the Australian Energy Regulator in 2019.

Other benefits of the project include:

• Improved service levels and lower maintenance costs – an LED rollout when accompanied by smart controls technology can dramatically improve service levels by notifying the operator of outages and other faults.
• Connectivity – networking of smart connected street lights are being increasingly recognised as a key enabler of smart community deployments as they are able to support a range of other devices in the public domain at low marginal cost once installed.
• Reduced electricity use and improved lighting outcomes – LEDs will reduce the energy used by the lights, substantially reduce the operational cost of the lights and, by delivering high quality white light, increase the efficiency and effectiveness of public lighting which improves safety and reduces fear of crime.