Slashdot Mirror
UK To Dim Highway Lights To Save Money
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that street lights on thousands of miles of major roads in England will be dimmed during quiet periods to save money and reduce carbon emissions. The Highways Agency has already turned off the lights on more than 80 miles of the motorway network and will soon begin a survey of where this can be done on the 2,500 miles of A roads it controls. Nigel Parry, of the Institution of Lighting Professionals, says that technology enabled lights can be controlled individually and remotely. 'The idea is that when traffic is busy, such as during the morning and evening rush hour, you have them at their brightest. When the traffic disappears you can dim them. You can maintain safety and use half as much energy.'"
welcome our new dark overlords.
Korma: Good
I doubt that highway lights are an actual safety improvement, considering that the german Autobahn don't have them at all.
bickerdyke
if this makes for less light pollution then even better.
now if we can get warehouses to shut off their lights at night even better - security my ass - have they not heard of IR / lowlight video cameras - that would help even more...
who where what when now?
Long answer: street lights reduce the glare from oncoming vehicles, which is at its worst at busy times. On 'A' roads, they also let you distinguish motorcycles from our increasing number of one-headlamp drivers. On the other hand, I've seen the result of the Porsche that overtook me once doing at least 200k at night meeting the Polish artic with tiny lights covered in mud. With street lights, the Porsche driver might have seen the truck in time. As it was, Darwin claimed another victim.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Nuclear power platns don't have that, but coal and water plants do. And as you're not actually surprised by reduced energy consumption at night, reducing their output is feasable within a few hours. For the small, unexpected movements you have gas plants that can be turned on within a few seconds.
On the other hand, the street lights in populated areas (not highway lights, we don't have them here) are indeed used for load shedding of nuclear power plants. (Worked in a town with one until two years ago. saw the streetlights on at day quite a few times)
bickerdyke
Why wouldn't you turn the lights off during rush hour? More cars mean more car lights, which automatically illuminates substantial portions of the road, whereas during trough hours, there are few cars.
It would thus make more sense to not have lights during high traffic times.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
The biggest problem is that LED (CREE etc) based streetlights have not yet been ratified by the EU and so cannot be used on public highways in the UK. If they do become ratified then there will be huge power savings. In China, they have whole motorways lit up using this technology. Not only do they burn less power, but the lantern lifetime is much longer than the standard sodium units that have a warranty lifespan of 3 to 5 years.
One of the problems about dimming lanterns is that the lamp post spacing is all based around the lamps at a certain luminenscence and so dimming may create dark zones, or over bright zones. So some careful analysis will be needed about how the lamps dim and whether they dim uniformly or not.
The same place all the other excess energy goes into - methods to try and store it and use it at slightly less efficiency later in the day.
The usual example is to pump water back up a reservoir that's being used for electricity generation. So when it falls down again tomorrow, you can get useful energy from it again at the right time and only lose a percentage of the energy to keep pumping it back up there until you need it.
Still doesn't mean it's efficient but the thing about electricity planning is that they KNOW when things are going to ramp up or slow down (even down to the timing of the adverts in the middle of big football matches!) and if they know, they can do their best to compensate.
More likely, if the motorways are switched off on a regular basis, they will power down a more flexible station during those times because they know they won't have to supply as high a peak. You can't "turn off" nuclear easily, but the infrastructure isn't all nuclear. You could easily keep them going all the time to supply the "base" current and deal with peaks and spikes (like the motorway lights being on) with other means and get to shut down OTHER types of station that you wouldn't normally be able to because of the demand required.
Excess grid output, typically at night time, goes into places like Dinorwic (North Wales) and Ben Cruachan (Scotland), which are massive pumped-storage systems, which do a remarkable job of smoothing out the supply vs demand on the National Grid, by pumping millions of litres of water uphill at 'quiet' times, and can turn up the output on demand at ridiculously short notice (far faster than any thermal power station - oil,gas,coal, nuclear) when the population decide to turn on their kettles in sync during advert breaks on telly etc.
In Montana, when during a short and unusual period of rationality we had somewhat unlimited daytime driving speeds, nighttime driving was still constrained to relatively low speeds because there is no safe driving regime that includes over-driving one's headlights. And while during the day it was kind of difficult to get a ticket when driving reasonably, at night, they could nearly hang you at the side of the road if you stepped out of line. IMHO, that was driving heaven. Accidents declined below Montana's previous levels, and other than gas milage, the side effects were pretty much uniformly positive.
Personally, we (my family) bought a relatively high-powered sports car capable of long-term high speed runs, and intentionally focused on traveling during the day, as one got to the destination faster, the driving was a lot more fun, concentration was better as more things happen faster, and said concentration, easier or not, didn't have to be maintained for as long a period.
As an aside: Daytime driving is safer here because the animals generally keep their heads down or they get shot off by our not very lovable rednecks. Often heard here: "Wanna go bust some 'dawgs?" This is a euphemism for going out and "popping" prairie dogs, and anything else that might show its eyes or ears, with a high powered rifle. This is about as popular as drinking. and often the behaviors are combined. Anyway, it leads directly to a very cautious daytime wild animal population.
Alas, the feds applied significant pressure by threatening to withdraw highway funds, our state legislators invented nonsensical justifications to accommodate the idiot feds without exactly looking like they were accommodating them, we lost our driving paradise, accident rates went right back up, and there you have it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.