AMC in dilemma over streetlight energy savers

Good morning friends. Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation is in dilemma over a streetlight energy savers. It’s good to know that the Municipal is doing all the best they can as many will benefit on it.

A debate has ensued in Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) on installation of energy savers for over 90,000 streetlights for the city. The choice is between a system that costs Rs 5 lakh and saves 32 per cent electricity and a system that costs Rs 2.75 lakh and saves 44 per cent electricity.

AMC today has to spend more than Rs 1.1 crore of taxpayers' money on electricity bills every month. AMC's standing committee recently awarded a paid pilot project contract to streetlight energy saver that costs Rs 5 lakh a piece and saves anywhere between 28-33 per cent electricity. Each energy saver can efficiently save almost 20 to 80 streetlights of 250 watts and more depending on kilovolt Ampere electricity load.

In March this year, Hyderabad-based Light Matrix Street Lights Private Limited, had installed their energy savers near Kankaria Lake between March 28 and April 14. AMC's streetlight department has certified energy savings of up to 44.21 per cent at a cost of Rs 2.75 lakh. But strangely another company was approached and given a paid pilot project for equipment worth Rs 5 lakh which saved anywhere between 28 per cent initially and scaled up to 32 per cent savings till recently.

The technology is called streetlight automation and energy savings system (SLAES) and has been installed at Victoria Garden, Kankaria Lake, Gomtipur, Satellite, Kuberpur and Meghaninagar. "We are analyzing proposals of both the companies and trying to evaluate the best option. This is a preliminary stage. We will finalize the projects after the Kankaria festival," says a senior assistant city engineer AC Shah.

"The present system installed works on GSM technology and generates SMS reports about the condition of streetlights for mobile phones thus informing engineers about any technical fault. While Light Matrix has a GPRS-based technology of reporting via e-mails and SMSes when computer servers fail," said a senior engineer with the street lights department of AMC.

SLAES equipment generally reduces voltages of streetlights during off-peak hours and maintains required light intensity levels. The electricity load is maintained at threshold levels' which helps increase life of the cables and streetlights and bring down maintenance costs. Each energy saver device is manufactured according to the number of streetlights that need to be monitored. Each system can monitor anywhere between 40 and 90 and above streetlights at a single go. -The times of India

City’s green cover tonsured by 50%?

Good morning friends. Green! ….. that’s one of my favorite color. It’s a cool color. Everytime I see a green color it remimds me of a nature. It’s a good view if everytime you look at something, you see green. Meaning the trees are there, the plants are still growing… That’s good to know.

Green is going from the city at much faster pace than you can spell the word. The effective forest cover of the city has in fact been reduced by almost half in the past 10 years.

Consider this: For every 100 new tree saplings planted, two full-grown trees have been chopped off in the city in the name of development in the past few years, as per the official record of the forest department. Now, compare the area covered by a sapling — barely 1 square metre — to that of a full grown tree which is normally put at 100 square metres, or even more.

This means, a 100 saplings would compensate for a full grown tree in a given time. So effectively, in a given year the green cover (what a global positioning system data would declare), of the city was reduced to half. Forest officials admit that planting a tree sapling cannot be an ‘immediate replacement for a full-grown tree’. ‘‘But then, we are trying our best,’’ said district forest officer, Lucknow, Ashok Mishra.

According to the data of the forest department, 9,334 full grown trees were felled for various development activities — road widening, housing, electricity poles and of course some of the state government ‘‘priority projects’’ like Ambedkar Udyan, Kanshi Ram Smarak and Rama Bai Rally Sthal in 2007-08. - The Times of India