New Zealand Street Lighting Updates Could Make for an Attractive Market
New Zealand lighting designer Bryan Kingestimates that his country is roughly 5 years behind the United States in terms of upgrading street light infrastructure from high-pressure sodium (HPS) to light-emitting diode (LED). Recent developments and a successful Road Lighting conference, however, may help close that gap quickly or even put the small country in the lead. This makes for an interesting case study in how a smaller market can rapidly shift from one technology to another, undergoing the process at a much faster rate than larger markets are capable of doing.
Favorable Factors
According to Navigant Research’s Smart Street Lighting report, there are an estimated 370,000 street lights installed in New Zealand. This represents a small fraction of the installed base of the United States and other large countries, making the challenge of upgrading far less daunting. Another significant factor that this country has in its favor is that municipal lighting is generally owned by the municipality, rather than by a utility that may not have a financial incentive to reduce electricity consumption, especially during nighttime hours. In addition, 50% of funding for street lighting comes from the NZ Transport Agency. This government agency has recently stipulated that its funding must be spent on LED lights and not on older lamp technologies. That alone will spur retrofit projects and likely means that no new HPS luminaires will be purchased.
The recently held Road Lighting 2015 conference is also expected to drive adoption of both LED street lighting and networked street lighting control. The conference organizers were able to gather representatives from a significant portion of the country’s municipalities, who then learned from city managers and other experts from around the world who have already implemented LED and controls projects. While decision makers in the United States often seem reluctant to draw on international experiences, decision makers in New Zealand were quite eager to benefit from the lessons learned by their peers around the globe.
Road Lighting
A significant focus of the Road Lighting conference was on the use of networked controls to deliver advanced control features to street lighting systems. As discussed in Smart Street Lighting,networked systems are being adopted in ever growing numbers around the world, but many municipalities have upgraded to LEDs without also adding controls. A new and widely adopted American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard (136.41)means that adding controls after a luminaire has been installed is relatively simple, but it still involves physically accessing every single street light. Thus, it entails a cost and effort that deters many municipalities. New Zealand is in an excellent position to take advantage of the benefits of both LEDs and controls, installing both of these now maturing technologies at the same time to reduce costs.
It is yet to be seen just how quickly New Zealand will adopt LED street lighting and networked lighting control. The City of Auckland has announced plans to switch all of its lights to LEDs in the next 5 years, and the timeline is expected to be similar for other cities and only slightly slower for smaller municipalities. So, while the total market size is modest, the rapid changeover when conditions are ripe can still make a small market attractive to international manufacturers.
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