Energy conservation: City looks for advisor to study LED impact

Tepa says LED lights installed on 14 roads; Jail Road next.

LAHORE:

The city government is to issue another tender to hire a transaction advisor to study the benefits of installing LED streetlights in the city, after only one party expressed an interest in the previous tender, The Express Tribune has learnt.

Government contracts must get at least two bids, otherwise the process has to be restarted. The Public Private Partnership Steering Committee approved the hiring of an advisor to study the benefits of installing LED lights in Lahore at a meeting in March.

District Officer Abdul Qayyum said the Punjab government was ready to offer the advisor up to Rs3 million. The transaction advisor would study the impact of replacing conventional streetlights and lights at government offices with LEDs, including the initial cost and the savings in electricity. Based on the study, the advisor would suggest how much the government should offer the company eventually hired to set up LED lights.

Lahore is to be a test case to assess the benefits of LED lights, with lights in the rest of the Punjab to be converted later. At the March meeting, the steering committee was told that conventional sodium lights consume 120 per cent more energy than LEDs.

Separately, the Lahore Development Authority launched a project in February to convert streetlights on 15 city roads to LEDs at a cost of Rs160 million. Traffic Engineering and Transport Planning Agency (Tepa) Chief Engineer Saeed Akhtar said that the lights on 14 of the 15 roads had been replaced, with only Jail Road remaining.

In August, a Chinese company installed two hundred solar powered lamps on 100 poles on Wahdat Road and Allama Iqbal Town’s Main Boulevard. Tepa is to study the working of the lights over four months to assess their performance, said Akhtar. The study will help them decide if converting all streetlights to run on solar power is feasible.

Tepa is also in touch with a local company which is offering to install 20 solar-powered lamps on 10 poles on Jail Road near Siddique Trade Centre, he added. The company wants to install their own poles too.

Earlier this year, two private companies expressed an interest in paying for the conversion of traffic signals at five squares to run on solar power, but the signals at only two squares were converted.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 7^th, 2013.