Like many councils, Hampshire County Council is facing an eye-wateringly difficult financial future. This will invariably affect the county’s street lighting provision, as Julian Higgins writes, and is likely to accelerate the transition – where appropriate – to solar.
Hampshire County Council is the second largest highway lighting authority in UK, second only to Lancashire.
We have about 157,000 items of illuminated street furniture, of which about 144,000 are streetlights; most of the rest are illuminated signs. We maintain all this at a cost – in terms of maintenance and energy – of £11.8m per annum.
Over the past 13 years we have cut our energy consumption and carbon emissions by over 60% through the introduction of more energy-efficient equipment, CMS and the usual topics of dimming and trimming – and also, in 2019, part-night lighting.
But the authority, in addition to the climate-change crisis that we all already face, now faces one of its greatest funding crises in living memory. I’ve not had a time in my near-40 years in local government where people are starting to talk about bankruptcy and Section 114 notices with such regular frequency.
It is a huge issue for the entire industry. It has begged me to ask the question: are our existing lighting technologies fit for purpose or not? I have to admit that my initial conclusion is ‘no, they are not’.
So, what options are we facing? Option one: avoid. In other words, put no new lighting in on residential developments whatsoever. That obviously isn’t going to be particularly popular with residents – but it is an option.
The next option, option two, is initial provision of supporting infrastructure only. So, putting in the conduits, the potential sockets etc and potentially install new lighting later on as and when it arises.
The third option, and the subject of the remainder of this article, is solar power. This could be installed using what I term as either new footway or way-finder stands. This would constitute a new standard service provision in-house.
Option four: we continue to install lighting as we do now, but it is funded through community subs. Then, finally, option five is to continue installing lighting as we do now, entirely mains-powered, at the taxpayer’s expense. But I don’t think that is a sustainable solution moving forward, particularly when you hear governments talking about massive increases in housing.
GOING DOWN THE SOLAR ROUTE
So, what changes would I need to make to my service provision table if I want to go down this new solar route? In addition to the lighting provision column, I will now need to have an energy provision column. Our dark skies reserves? Nothing, no change, in there, as we’re not going to be putting new lighting into those areas anyway.
For everywhere else, however, effectively it will be split into two. For unclassified, residential routes we can potentially say, OK we’re going to put lighting in, it’s going to be solar powered.
Before making a decision of this magnitude, I naturally wanted to put some trials in. I wanted to find a housing estate where I could basically package things up, look at various different manufacturers and trial some products, all in a nice, easy environment and area.
The first place I looked at was just down the road from me, a place called Fish Lane Meadows in Romsey. It had been used as a testbed for previous trials of things such as Cosmopolis lamps, PLL lamps, part-light photocells, and solar bollards.
The estate itself was built in the mid-1990s, using 5m hockey-stick columns. They were designed to take the weight of a standard 50-watt high-pressure sodium lantern. And it was that that, quite quickly, emerged as the problem.
Very early on in my discussions with manufacturers it became clear that weight was going to be a significant issue. The type of column we’ve got installed there was designed to take maybe 9-12kg.
The lanterns being put forward weighed double, if not three times, that. And that was before taking account for any additional exterior solar panels that you might want to put up, which obviously increases the windage way beyond the columns’ structural integrity.
The cost of ripping all of those columns out and putting in brand new columns to meet the structural requirements would have blown the business case out of the water; it was simply a waste of public money that I couldn’t entertain so, of course, I dropped that idea.
TRIAL SITE
However, I think I may have found an alternative site. It is new development to the north of Romsey called King’s Chase. To the right of the estate, there is a sports’ ground owned by the local borough council that has some fantastic perimeter footpaths.
They are completely unobstructed, so they have full south-facing views; it is on an elevated location near the top of a hill. So, it is in an ideally placed position for me to put in different manufacturers’ lanterns and trial them.
The only problem, as I just alluded to, is that it isn’t a public highway. So – and I haven’t done this yet – I will need to go on my hands and knees to the local borough council and say please can I use your land under agreement to do some solar trials?
Fortunately, alongside our proposed trial site, there are also some existing solar sites in Hampshire I have uncovered which I think are examples of good design practice if you’re going to consider solar power for your housing developments.
They’ve put the columns into positions where the panels can be orientated south; they’ve kept them clear of any other obstructions; and they’ve kept the trees out of the way. The trees they’ve chosen, too, have very narrow canopies when mature. So, it doesn’t matter how tall they grow, they will never get in the way of the panels or the lights.
IMPORTANCE OF MAINTENANCE
The other thing I must consider, and something else that we very rarely hear anybody talk about, is maintenance contracts. What maintenance do I need to undertake on this equipment once it has been installed?
Then there is battery replacement. In my KPIs, I put nine to 12 years; most manufacturers will give you a nine-year battery life. But clearly, you’re going to need to replace those batteries at some point.
Then there is parts’ maintenance. The LED arrays are going to fail, the drivers are going to fail, and the controllers are going to fail. You need a way, through CMS, to report those failures so that you can repair them within a reasonably quick period of time.
If you’re mounting this equipment on posts, you need to undertake structural inspections on them. That is again something that the manufacturers expect you to know about but may not mention it themselves.
My existing PFI contract excludes solar power. So, at the moment anything that we have of a solar-powered nature is being repaired and maintained by my intelligent traffic systems’ colleagues. But if we’re going to be increasing the number of solar assets on the highway significantly, you’ll need a specialised placements contract to deal with that.
CONCLUSIONS
So, what is my timeline for implementation? I’ve said between 2024 and 2027 to instigate the trials. If it is doable, I just need to get on with it, quite frankly.
In terms of putting out a new specification, if we find a product that is viable, I would anticipate doing that sometime within the 27/28 financial year. And that could lead to the first adoption in 2029.
What we then need to do is to plug the gap until the PFI contract ends on 31 March 2025, at which point we could very well have a combined mains- and solar-powered, and even EV, maintenance contract moving forward.
It would be nice to think that I could replace all my existing residential lighting mains-powered equipment over five years with solar power by the time we get to 2035, even if I personally will be retired by that point.
Julian Higgins is assistant highways manager, ITS and Street Lighting, at Hampshire County Council
Image: Emsworth in Hampshire/Pexels
This is an abridged version of Julian’s article in the November/December edition of Lighting Journal. To read the full article, please go to the page-turner on this web page.
