Increased personnel costs, more money for energy and refugee accommodation: Bavaria’s municipalities are groaning under high expenditure burdens. A survey by the German Press Agency showed that some cities want to reduce their costs by, among other things, switching street lighting to LED lamps (Light Emitting Diodes). For those who converted their street lighting to energy-saving high-pressure sodium vapor lamps just a few years ago, further modernization would be uneconomical and expensive. But that’s not the only reason why the work varies in scope.
Between Aschaffenburg and Augsburg, municipalities want to achieve greater energy efficiency and lower harmful carbon dioxide emissions with LEDs in street lights – and of course save money. Since 2011, up to 500 outdated lights have been replaced every year in Aschaffenburg with lights with modern LED technology. According to the city, energy consumption should be reduced by at least 50 percent. The German Energy Agency (Dena) even assumes that switching to LED technology can reduce consumption in municipalities by more than 80 percent.
Delivery bottlenecks due to pandemic and war
Those responsible in Würzburg are also pursuing this goal. There are a total of around 16,400 lights on the streets and sidewalks in the Mainstadt – almost 10,200 lights have been using LED technology for a long time. According to Würzburger Liefer- und Verkehrs-GmbH, a further 5,500 were converted to LED this year. Only around 700 special lights will remain as gas and tunnel lights.
The state capital of Munich takes care of around 100,000 street lights. 68,000 of them will be equipped with LEDs in the future. “Energy saving and ecological aspects play an important role here,” is how the city explains the planned conversion measures. However, the work would be made more difficult by pandemic and war-related delivery bottlenecks among lighting manufacturers and executing companies.
In Nuremberg, all light points should be converted to LEDs in the next five years – according to the city, that would be 48,000. So far, most are sodium vapor lamps, LED lights only make up around a quarter.
Not too much artificial light
The switch from street lamps to LEDs has been taking place in many European countries for years. However, this has changed the color spectrum of the nighttime lighting. The use of LEDs means that even fewer stars are visible in cities and that the movement of moths and other insects as they approach or avoid light sources further changes. According to researchers, light pollution, i.e. the trend towards continuous lighting at night with artificial light, is probably a main cause of global species extinction. Artificial light disrupts the internal clock of many animals, as a visiting scientist from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich has discovered.
Energy-saving modernization is a must
Many municipalities have previously used sodium vapor lamps with orange-yellow light – more than 16 percent of them are in the approximately 18,500 lights in Regensburg, for example. “New systems will only be designed using LED technology,” says the city – around 62 percent of the light sources used are now LEDs. At night, the lighting is also dimmed between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. Traffic lights should also be converted to energy-saving LED technology. But there is no way around energy-saving modernization: Since the EU Ecodesign Directive, including the ban on light bulbs, also applies to municipalities, street lighting has to be changed in many places.
In Augsburg there are around 30,000 light points on public streets, paths and squares. “They are mostly operated with sodium vapor lamps but also with LED, LCD and halogen lamps,” says the Department of Urban Development, Planning and Building. “Sometimes fluorescent tubes are also used.” Only just under ten percent of the lamps are LEDs. The existing lights would be controlled as needed, saving energy and reducing light pollution. “In Augsburg we already act according to the principle: ‘Artificial light – as much as necessary, as little as possible’ https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/.”