Cape Town’s traffic lights have gone green… in more ways than one.
The City of Cape Town has completed the retrofitting of its 1 378 traffic signals with low-energy Light Emitting Diode (LED) lights. This will save 3 945 Megawatt hours and 3 932 tonnes in total carbon emissions annually, not only reducing the City’s environmental impact, but also saving electricity costs.
The retrofitting project started nearly seven years ago and saw 41 500 incandescent and halogen lamps being replaced by LEDs using grant funding of about R25 million.
The City became a participant in the Department of Energy’s Municipal Energy Efficiency Demand Side Management (EEDSM) programme, which is a grant fund disbursed to municipalities to implement energy efficient retrofits in municipal infrastructure. It enabled the City to fast-track interventions in street lighting, municipal buildings and traffic signals.
Not only do the LED lamps consume only a fraction of the electricity compared with incandescent and halogen lamps, they have a longer lifespan, lower maintenance and electricity burning costs, produce fewer faults at intersections, and they have a higher visibility, thus making intersections safer.
“The City of Cape Town has, for a very long time, been focused on how we can save energy in order to reduce environmental impact, improve resource efficiency, and minimise excessive electricity costs – especially in light of Eskom’s tariff increases and our country’s electricity supply shortages,” said Mayoral Committee Member for Transport, Roads and Stormwater, Cllr Brett Herron.
“The Energy Efficiency Demand Side Management Programme has allowed us to pursue our sustainable City objectives comprehensively and we are able to celebrate a huge saving in electricity usage and cost. At the same time we are producing less greenhouse gases.
He added that the City is also working on many fronts to reduce the environmental impact of transport, including prioritising public transport over private vehicle usage; implementing a bold new vision for a public transport network; and piloting the Travel Smart project, in which it is working with seven city-based large employers to develop sustainable commuting solutions for their employees.
“In this small project, that we certainly hope to see grow into a major intervention once we have completed the pilot, we are working with visionary commercial partners to reduce the peak hour commuter spike, encourage shared travel, and reduce the number of cars on the road, and we are promoting active mobility as a mode of transport to get to work,” he said.
