Borough council to save £49,000 after Sywell Parish Council installs green street lighting

A parish council in Northamptonshire is on track to reduce its carbon footprint and energy use after investing in a £14,993 street lighting upgrade.

Sywell Parish Council is set to save more than £2,100 a year following a lighting replacement programme, which saw 65 streetlights across replaced with efficient LED alternatives and four heritage lanterns have been upgraded.

Maureen Holliday, parish clerk for Sywell Parish Council, said: “As well as reducing our costs, our street lighting upgrade has brought benefits to our community, improving the quality of lighting we provide across the parish.

"The council is also pleased to be able to show that it is pro-active in addressing this green issue.

"The funding from Salix took away the need for us to have upfront capital, making the project more affordable to us and enabling us to deliver the scheme all at once, as a single project rather than in stages. This has meant we could benefit from the savings more quickly.”

The new LED fittings will reduce Sywell Parish Council’s annual energy bills by approximately £2,100 while making carbon savings of around 3.38 tonnes of CO2e a year.

The upgrades will also have the added benefit of reducing maintenance costs for the council due to the longer lifetime of the LED lanterns.

In total, the scheme is estimated to the save the council more than £49,000 over the lifetime of the new technology.

Sywell Parish Council is hoping to inspire other parishes to consider LED street lighting when looking to be more environmentally friendly as their energy consumption is down by 75 percent.

The parish council has been able to make the improvements thanks to an interest-free loan of £14,993 from Salix Finance, an independent, government-funded organisation that provides interest-free funding to public sector organisations to invest in energy efficient technologies, helping them reduce their carbon emissions and energy spend.

Salix was able to fund 92% of the total project value of £16,235 based on the carbon and energy savings.