The street lights in London’s Downing Street have been upgraded to LEDs.
The project involved upgrading the existing heritage DW Windsor ‘Windsor’ lanterns to LED and smart light, wirelessly controlled, drivers.
Dave Franks, service development manager for the City of Westminster’s lighting services department, said: “We are continually reviewing new lighting technologies to ensure we are using the best solutions, so when the Downing Street lighting became due for an upgrade it was an opportunity to make use of LEDs, integrating them with the ‘smart lighting’ CMS (Central Management System) that we are rolling out across all of our public lighting.
“Downing Street is a unique environment that required us to address a number of design challenges. It is not a uniform street, from a lighting perspective, and we also had to ensure the new lighting would be acceptable to the residents without creating issues for security or media cameras. Because of the high security, access for maintenance can also be quite difficult.”
Supporting the City of Westminster’s long term strategy to optimise street lighting whilst reducing energy consumption and carbon footprint within the City, DW Windsor proposed a solution that involved replacing the existing HID gear trays with retrofit LED light engines.
The new 3000K LED light engines have replaced 70W (2800K) HID, effectively maintaining the light levels while using approximately half the energy, with the potential for an additional 20% energy savings from the use of an adaptive lighting approach, controlled through the CMS. Energy consumption is reduced from 7500KWH to 4900KWH and carbon emissions have been reduced substantially from 3,934kg to 2,570kg.
The projected life of the new light sources is around 20 years.