The use of formal methods and artificial intelligence has made it possible to automatically design outdoor lighting. Quick design for large cities, in a matter of hours instead of weeks, and analysis of various optimization criteria enables to save energy and tune profit stream from lighting retrofit. Since outdoor lighting is of a large scale, having luminaires on every street in urban areas, and since it needs to be retrofitted every 10 to 15 years, choosing proper parameters and light sources leads to significant energy savings. This paper presents the concept and calculations of Levelized Cost of Electricity for outdoor lighting retrofit. It is understood as cost of energy savings, it is in the range from 23.06 to 54.64 EUR/MWh, based on real-world cases. This makes street and road lighting modernization process the best green “energy source” if compared with the 2018 Fraunhofer Institute cost of electricity renewable energy technologies ranking. This indicates that investment in lighting retrofit is more economically and ecologically viable than investment in new renewable energy sources.
Roadway lighting retrofit is a process continuously developed in urban environments due to both installation aging and technical upgrades. The spectacular example is replacing the high intensity discharge (HID) lamps, usually high pressure sodium (HPS) ones, with the sources based on light-emitting diodes (LED). The main focus in the related research was put on energy efficiency of installations and corresponding financial benefits. In this work, we extend those considerations analyzing how lighting optimization impacts greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction and what are the resultant financial benefits expressed in terms of emission allowances prices. Our goal is twofold: (i) obtaining a quantitative assessment of how a GHG footprint depends on a technological scope of modernization of a city HPS-based lighting system; and (ii) showing that the costs of such a modernization can be decreased by up to 10% thanks to a lowered CO 2 emission volume. Moreover, we identify retrofit patterns yielding the most substantial environmental impact.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.