Helsinki to replace all street lamps

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In compliance with the EU directive for lamps, the City of Helsinki is obliged to replace all mercury-vapour lamps along its roads and in its parks by energy-saving high-pressure lamps or metal halide lamps.
     
The replacement will cause the city additional expenditure of around EUR 20 million.
      ”In the entire country, the process of replacing all mercury-vapour lamps will cost hundreds of millions of euros”, estimates Helsinki Energy’s Eero Metso, who is in charge of the city’s electrical solutions.
      In addition, similar mercury-vapour lamps are widely used for interior lighting in department stores or warehouses, and for outdoor lighting in some industrial storage facilities.
     
Initially, the European Union intended to demand that all its member states should replace the mercury-vapour lamps by the end of the current year. However, on the initiative of Finland, Denmark, and Belgium, a transitional period of six years was granted for the process.
      ”The original schedule would have been completely impossible, as neither electricians nor suitable lamps would have been available. Yet nearly all EU states failed to take any notice of what they were up against. Helsinki Energy sent a letter to the Ministry of Employment and the Economy in order to be granted a sufficiently long transitional period for the project”, Metso reports.
     
The City of Helsinki has about 81,000 lamps in its outdoor areas, some 47,000 of which are old mercury-vapour lamps.
      ”In recent years, we have already replaced almost half of the old lamps by energy-saving ones in connection with various maintenance and modernisation projects”, Metso evaluates.
      The new type of high-pressure lamps consume some twenty or thirty per cent less energy than do mercury-vapour lamps. However, part of the energy savings gained from using high efficiency lamps will be used for raising lighting efficiency.
     
According to Metso, the mercury of old lamps is not an environmental problem itself, as the amount of mercury is very small and the recycling of the lamps is effective.
      The replacement of mere lamps is not enough, and in most cases, all fixtures, fittings, and electrical connections have to be replaced by new ones as well.
     
The City of Helsinki intends to postpone the replacement process closer to the end of the transitional period - the year 2015.
      One reason for this decision is that the orange colour that the present high-pressure lamps deliver does not look good in parks, while metal halide lamps providing an energy-efficient source of white light are still expected to develop further.
     
Nowadays, old incandescent light bulbs are used only in certain applications, including the lights of the ”Christmas Street” in Aleksanterinkatu.
      Soon these, too, are likely to be replaced by light-emitting diodes.


Links:
  Helsinki Energy
  Ministry of Employment and the Economy

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