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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
Covid-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
FEBRUARY 2021 LIGHTING JOURNAL 39
Street lighting and Covid-19
probably lost three or four weeks and none of us – Wirral or our contractor on the ground, SSE – knew whether, or when, we could get on site.
‘It was a massive learning experience for all parties. Basically we just had to say, “right, this is what we need to do, what do you need to do?”. We couldn’t sustain manufacturing indefinitely; equally, SSE couldn’t sustain having people on the project but not on site indefinitely. There were loads of questions, like what ways could we still work, how many people could you have in vehicles and so on? But we all just worked hard and pulled together.
‘Covid was such an unusual thing; we recognised we all just had this huge obstacle in front of us and it was, “how can we continue to deliver a project of this scale and nature?”. Very quickly, by the end of April things had ramped up, if anything. SSE found they had extra resource because they were still allowed to work outside whereas not everyone was able to work inside, so they were able to throw extra people at it.
‘SSE also had to start sending out two vehicles rather than one, so with just one person in rather than dual occupancy, for social distancing reasons. The HIAB [elevated platform] was going out with another vehicle as well. So you still had two people on site, just not in the same vehicle.
‘There were a lot of small things that affected things. For example, really early on, when people were being bussed from airports to safe holding or isolation points, the buses were coming into the Wirral depot, which meant we couldn’t deliver. It was closed at short notice and Wirral had to negotiate to get it reopened,’ Nathan adds.
‘We also needed to avoid bringing columns through the Mersey Tunnel so as to not cause congestion or hold up key transport,’ highlights Brian. ‘But Wirral Council reacted really quickly and made available land it had on the dockside, in Wallasey, which made it easier to get the columns out on site during the crisis. It made it far easier than transporting columns from the other side of the Mersey each day.’
WORKING TOGETHER
‘For me, looking back, the lesson of that whole period was simply how everyone stepped up,’ agrees Nathan.
‘There was a bit of a deer in the headlights feel at first I think for everyone right at the beginning of the first lockdown. For example, at ASD we suddenly couldn’t use our canteen in the same way or our toilets. It was daft little things like it had the old-fashioned Wimpey-style seating, and you couldn’t move the chairs.
‘We had to take out all of our canteen furniture and put in new furniture to enable proper spacing; we had to stagger breaks and go to two shifts. We reduced the number of people on each line and spread the timeframe out. People were going from roughly 6am-10pm, the same amount of staff just over a longer time period. It was little tweaks like that that just made a difference.
‘The fact we use a really local UK supply chain where possible meant that everything was able to continue moving pretty smoothly, barring that first fortnight when everyone went, “oh bit of a panic on, what do we do?”. I think everyone of course, across the industry, was facing these same sorts of problems at the time. But we all just gathered our thoughts, worked together, and moved things forward,’ Nathan adds.
p Wirral Council’s switch from sodium (top) to LED street lighting will save it money and energy, but it has also been a
