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FEBRUARY 2021
LIGHTING JOURNAL
KEEPING THE COGS TURNING Wirral Council’s massive transition to LED street lighting will result in significant energy savings when it is fully completed later this year. But keeping it pushing forward during a year of pandemic lockdowns and supply chain interruptions proved a business continuity challenge for everyone involved
By Nic Paton
C
ovid-19 messed with all of our heads during 2020, but it also of course played merry havoc with schedules, deadlines and supply lines, not least within the lighting industry and especially during the first lockdown back one year ago next month. One project that found itself in the eye of a Covid storm was Wirral Council’s massive transition project for its street lighting infrastructure from sodium to LED, a project that will eventually see some 25,000 units being switched by the autumn of this year. As Brian Cartledge, consultant lighting engineer at Wirral Council, tells Lighting
Journal the hope was – and remains – that the ‘narrative’ of this project will be the combination of urban regeneration and renewal it will bring, along with the significant energy savings that will accrue from switching to LED, using the Highway Diamond Elite from ASD Lighting. ‘We’re realising savings of 60%, so we’re looking at perhaps £800,000 savings in total,’ he says. ‘We’ve already saved approximately 1,000 tonnes of carbon emissions. The targets Wirral is working to achieve, and the energy savings we are set to be making, which are, after all, the key to the project, continue and are deliverable.’
BUSINESS CONTINUITY CHALLENGE
Yet, as it has so often during the past year, the impact of Covid-19 just won’t go away. In this case, as Nathan French, director of street lighting at manufacturer ASD Lighting makes clear, the project is in many ways a textbook – and very positive – example of how lighting professionals and ILP members across the country responded with creativity, doggedness and innovation to a business continuity challenge like none of us had ever experienced before. ‘Covid broke out in the middle of the project,’ he explains. ‘That, of course, caused all of us concerns; I think we
