Bright lights, cleaner cities
2023-12-1
Sustainable and connected lighting technologies are key to improving energy efficiency and reducing carbon emissions in the built environment.
On November 15th 2022 the UN announced that the world’s population had reached 8bn. By 2050 the global population will have grown to just under 10bn, and 6.6bn people will live in cities – double the number in 2007. One of the biggest challenges facing city governance is how to manage that growth over the next three decades.
A long-term infrastructure strategy is vital to a city's healthy and sustainable growth. It lays out how a city can move toward a smart future by successfully attracting new businesses, creating new jobs and improving citizens' quality of life. The most successful cities will be hubs for innovation, where they will be the test beds for new, life-enhancing technologies.
World leader in lighting Signify believes that it can be a vital partner in creating this kind of sustainable growth; its Green Switch programme helps cities and businesses to reduce energy consumption, cutting costs and carbon emissions, and to enhance both the outdoor infrastructure and the built environment to make it safer and more secure. Signify’s connected lighting can also provide a shared infrastructure for other smart city and smart building projects.
The US Department of Energy suggests that lighting is responsible for 15% of global electricity consumption and 5% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Lighting accounts for a large share of any city's energy costs and carbon emissions. According to Signify’s research, on average it constitutes between 20% and 40% of a municipality's electricity consumption.
The EU's Smart Cities research shows that most public lighting is old and inefficient. Around 75% of EU public lighting is more than 25 years old and uses inefficient lamps. Similarly, more than half of the 40m street lights in the US have not yet been upgraded to energy efficiency alternatives.
Public lighting does not just have to be functional. It can also be used to create dramatic effects, for example by lighting popular landmarks with colours on important anniversaries or national holidays.
Public lighting is not just about external spaces. The municipal indoor environment is equally important. Retrofitting public buildings not only significantly reduces their carbon footprint, but can also improve the quality of indoor public spaces and work environments. This can be done in many ways, such as providing natural lighting in large, open-plan offices or entirely windowless spaces.