Confidently presenting a robust and technically sound business case for street lighting and smart control upgrades will be easier from April, with the release of the IPWEA's Model Business Case for Street Lighting and Smart Controls.

Almost one million old street lights are likely to be replaced in Australia in the next three to four years, compelling many councils, road authorities and utilities to consider large-scale lighting upgrades. This is due to the global Minamata Convention on Mercury, which is already restricting the availability of old-mercury vapour lamps for street lighting in Australia. Almost 900,000 remaining mercury vapour street lights are found on Australian roads; without available replacement lamps, complete replacement of these lights in the near-term now appears inevitable. 

Written with support from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) and the Commonwealth Government’s Department of Environment and Energy, the Model Business Case – due for release shortly – provides guidance for local government, main road agency and utility staff wanting to put forward a compelling and accurate case for making the change to LED street lighting and/or smart controls.

It is a template document that can be adapted to suit individual circumstances and contains instructions and prompts to guide the writer through the process. Applicable to both large and small projects in urban and rural applications, the Model Business Case is written in plain English and is available under a Creative Commons licence, making it widely and freely available.

The Model Business Case will be the IPWEA Street Lighting and Smart Control (SLSC) Programme’s third guidance document. The first two documents in the suite – model specifications for public LED lighting and lighting controls – aim to assist public lighting buyers, vendors, contractors, funders and advisors to efficiently and economically procure LED lighting and smart control systems for public lighting.

IPWEA Acting CEO Ben Balov said the Model Business Case has been created to be a user-friendly tool that will accelerate the rollout of LED lighting and smart control projects.

“Sitting down to create a business case for a relatively new and complex field can understandably be daunting. We want to remove as many barriers as possible for best-practice LED and smart control changeovers,” Mr Balov said.

“IPWEA modelling shows that if every street light in Australia was converted to LEDs, councils would slash $100 million off their annual street lighting bills and reduce our street lighting’s energy use and greenhouse gas emissions by at least 52%. When you add in smart controls that allow street lights to be dimmed when appropriate, that energy reduction can be as high as 72%.

“Like the first two guidance documents in the suite, the Model Business Case will be a living document, updated regularly and as needed to bring certainty to the process of writing a street lighting and smart controls upgrade business case.”

The Model Business Case will be available on the SLSC website (www.slsc.org.au / www.slsc.org.nz) in April – if you would like to be notified when it is published, join the SLSC mailing list here.