The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation is gearing up for a pilot project to implement energy saving methods on 5,000 of the city’s total 1.25 lakh streetlights. The 10-sq km area of the city’s G/South administrative ward will be equipped with dimming technology units by the year-end.

As part of an exhaustive energy audit undertaken by the civic body for its water supply and sewerage departments, a consultant also studied the possibility of saving on street-lights. Accordingly, fixtures operating on a dimming technology have been selected. These will gradually reduce the brightness of street-lights when traffic is thin. Also, the switching off and on of will be an automated process. Outgoing Additional Municipal Commissioner (Projects) Manu Kumar Srivastava said tenders would be floated in the next few days. The selected agency will have to supply the fixtures, operate, monitor and maintain them for five years. The estimated expenditure for the pilot project, including the maintenance cost, is around Rs 2 crore.

“Energy conservation was one of the projects undertaken by the civic administration to reduce power utilization in the Water and Sewerage departments, hospitals and for streetlights,” he said. Every year, the BMC spends Rs 90 crore in energy bills only on streetlights. Officials hope to save 20 to 30 per cent of the energy bill. The BMC’s energy audit is part of the specifications and norms prescribed in the Centre’s National Municipal Accounting Manual, which makes it mandatory for municipal corporations and local government bodies to conduct an energy audit.

Chief Engineer (Mechanical and Engineering) Suhas Borgaonkar said that through dimming technology, the brightness of streetlights would reduce gradually during the night time. “Traffic on roads is less between midnight and 5 a.m. Therefore, the lights will be automatically regulated during these hours,” he said.

There are about 1.25 lakh streetlights in the city managed by three agencies. The civic administration has selected G/South ward for the pilot as it’s fully managed by BEST, which means coordination will be less complicated for the BMC.

About 5,000 streetlights on 2,500 poles in the ward will be equipped with a small unit on every pole. This unit will monitor the lamps and regulate their voltage, then transferring the data of energy consumption of that lamp to a group controller placed at the end of a row of lights. The data will be transferred to the control room.

Currently the BMC spends around Rs 1.8 crore a year on streetlight bills in the ward.