OREANDA-NEWS. An innovative street-lighting management system has helped one of England's largest county councils reduce its energy use, bringing significant cost and carbon savings.

Mayflower Central Management System designed to remotely manage, monitor and vary light output, has been installed to over 100,000 of Hampshire County Council's street lights helping achieve significant financial savings and reduced CO2 emissions by around 4,000 tonnes. That's equivalent to the CO2 emitted from around 1600 cars every year.

The installation of the technology began in 2010 through the Hampshire County Council Street Lighting Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and is set to be installed to around 150,000 lights by 2015. The innovative technology will allow Hampshire County Council to better control and vary the light output and avoid the need to switch lights off at night to make financial savings.

Mayflower Complete Lighting Control, owned by SSE Contracting, is already in use across more than 20 towns and cities in the UK. Its installation in Hampshire to over 100,000 street lights also makes it one of the single largest remotely monitored and managed street lighting systems in the world.

Patrick Mitchell, Head of Mayflower Complete Lighting Control, said: “This unique central management system has a vital role to play in helping local authorities and PFIs meet their energy reduction targets. We are delighted to see that Hampshire County Council is already seeing the benefits from the Mayflower CMS.

“The system's easy installation and its ability to control and monitor lights remotely enables the light emitted to be tailored to suit the external lighting requirements resulting in more efficient management of the lighting stock. It also eliminates the need for night scouting and increases lamp life which also contributes to cost efficiencies.”

Prior to installation of energy efficient lanterns and the Mayflower system, Hampshire's street-lighting was consuming around 50m kW hours of energy a year. This will be successfully reduced to 34m kW hours by 2015 with the majority of the savings attributed to the use of the variable light control feature of the Mayflower Central Management System.

Mayflower Central Management System now controls and monitors more than 175,000 street lights, bollards and signs in the UK and Ireland and can be used for both internal and external use.