New street lights 'will save Torbay hundreds of thousands of pounds'

Putting new LED bulbs in Torbay street lights will save the bay hundreds of thousands of pounds and more than 500 tonnes of carbon emissions every year.
Torbay Council is planning to spend £2.26million on replacing 3,431 of its old-style sodium lights with the new light-emitting diodes, as well as bringing in a new management system to control the lights.
The project is expected to pay for itself in savings in the next 12 years.
Torbay’s public highways have just under 15,000 street lights in total, each of them individually ‘managed’ at present, meaning that if they need to be adjusted they have to have an in-person visit at a cost of £120 a time.
The new set-up will mean all the lights could be managed, monitored and controlled from a single laptop.
Torbay’s lights are currently controlled by photoelectric cells that turn them on at dusk and off again at dawn. If they fail, and stay on 24 hours a day, it can take several weeks for repairs to be made, leading to wasted energy and unnecessary carbon emissions.
If the bay’s lights were to be dimmed, it would take a single engineer 147 days to alter them all at a rate of 50 a day and £20 a time. That would add up to nearly £300,000.
A report to the council’s cabinet said: “Our current system is too slow and costly to make changes to our streetlights.”
Under the new system the brightness of the lights could be changed at the touch of a button.
“Anything that is good for the environment and good for the budget gets my support,” said Cllr Nick Bye (Con, Wellswood).
Cllr Adam Billings (Con, Churston with Galmpton) told a meeting of the cabinet that it was a ‘spend to save’ project.
“Finding a way of allowing ourselves to slightly dim some of the lamps, and making a financial saving and carbon saving at the same time, makes this a very important project,” he said.
Members of the cabinet approved the plan unanimously.