Essex County Council is planning to save around £1M a year by turning off streetlighting across the region.
The county currently pays £3.8M a year just for energy charges, excluding maintenance, for 120,000 lights.
The authority will now look at a pilot in two areas – Uttlesford District Council in the north of the county, and Maldon District Council in the east – where lights will be turned off between midnight and 5am by September.
First, the scheme will have to clear the council’s three working days call-in procedure, which ends on 27 July.
Then, if no councillor objects to the scheme, the authority will go into talks with the police and local business leaders in the pilot areas to identify the exact locations where lights could be switched off. If the scheme proves a success, it will then be rolled out across the county.
‘When I was a small boy, I was told if you went out of a room you turned the light off,’ said Councillor Rodney Bass, cabinet member for highways and transportation. ‘That’s what this is all about – old-fashioned common sense.’
The decision by Essex goes against the views of Roger Elphick, chair of the UK Lighting Board, who does not see switching off streetlights as the right way to respond to increasing energy costs and calls for emissions to be cut. The board plans to advise highways authorities on ways of escaping the worst of the price hikes in other ways, such as by dimming lights (Surveyor, 6 July).
Bass said areas where lights are needed for road safety or crime-prevention reasons and in town centres would be kept on. He also stressed that financial savings were secondary to the amount of pollution the scheme would cut.
Currently, the council’s practice is for streetlights to be kept on throughout the hours of darkness, regardless of where they are located.
Essex County Council funds the total energy consumption of 44M-kilowatt hours of electricity – equating to 19,000 tonnes of carbon emissions – and the scheme is intended to cut this by around one-third.