Duplicate Street Lighting

Project to switch off some duplicate street lights to save CO₂ emissions

We took action to switch off some duplicate street lights where they performed no useful function and wasted energy.

Across Essex, there were a number of street lights that illuminated the same area; often this duplication happened when a new development installed street lights which were then adopted by the Council and in a few cases overlapped with existing illumination.

We planned to switch off the small proportion of identified duplicates – working with district and borough councils in the process.

Essex Highways’ street lighting staff began the project in late December 2019 and continued during 2020.

The proposal was to do a detailed 'desktop' mapping exercise and then follow this up with on-site investigations of each light which had been identified as possibly duplicate. Only where the light was found to be lighting the same area as another street light, and where there were no safety concerns, was that light switched off. Signs were put on switched-off lights, so people did not report them as being faulty.

A pilot project was mapped out where we identified 36 potentially duplicate lights out of a total of 2260 in the area for potential switch-off. This was approximately 1.5% of lights estimated as duplicates. If the same ratio was consistent across Essex, then about 2,000 lights out of 127,000* lights in total could be turned off.

*correct at time of publication