Wokingham Council Cuts Carbon – Installing LED Lights
Wokingham Borough Council is making its estate more environmentally friendly, one building at a time through a variety of energy saving programmes. First up, lighting.
LED Lights
Over the summer the council set to work on making All Saints School in Wokingham greener by replacing outdated energy-intensive lighting with energy-saving LED lights and adding some insulation to parts of the building. The project improved the school’s carbon profile by an estimated 15 tonnes of carbon dioxide over the lifetime of the lights and more than £39,000 in the first six years alone in energy savings for the school.
The lights last for 20 years, are more reliable than the old lights, require fewer lights as they are better and brighter, and unlike traditional lights, LEDs don’t get dimmer as they get older.
New Lighting
The new lighting has the added benefit of helping enhance pupils’ learning and achieve better results.
“The new lighting is a win-win-win project: the schools wins by saving much needed money on their running costs and improving the learning environment for their pupils; the council wins by greening up its estate and working towards its goal of being carbon neutral by 2030; and the earth wins by having 15 tonnes less of carbon dioxide,” said Gregor Murray, executive member for climate emergency.
“This programme has been so successful with All Saints School that we are rolling it out to other schools. We have over £150,000 committed to LED replacement lighting this financial year and are hopefully increasing that amount next year.”
