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Street lighting contestability has hit the national headlines with an article on page 40 of the Australian Financial Review on Tuesday 12th August investigating the progress of Moreland and Sunshine Coast in their journeys to implement alternative street lighting maintenance programs. It’s a great article by the AFR’s Michael Bleby who clearly did his research and contacted a breadth of experts and the regulator to get their take. Here's where it's at.

The three greatest barriers that councils have traditionally faced when seeking to changeover their street lights to more efficient alternatives are costs, expertise and working with external stakeholders. However the traditional barriers that councils faced have been well and truly overcome in many jurisdictions. Here's how - and the tried and tested five-stage process to change your lights.

Ironbark have been working with 35 of the 39 Victorian councils who were successful in applying for street lighting funding through round two of CEEP. The installation of the new energy efficient lights has begun and councils have started saving on electricity and maintenance costs as well as greenhouse emissions. So when the Federal Budget was handed down a few weeks ago a few councils had an eye on potential future projects and also the impact on currently funded projects. Here’s the wrap.

Yep, another one! The City of Whittlesea has begun their energy efficient street lighting changeover. Council are changing a massive 6,900 street lights to more energy efficient alternatives that use 70% less energy, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and saving the community millions of dollars that can now be spent on more important services.

Ironbark and Alleasing have put their heads together to come up with a simple model for councils to achieve energy savings at no capital cost. Councils can replace building equipment and install renewable energy without having to pay upfront. Instead, Alleasing provides the finance and councils pay it back over time. It can be arranged to be cash flow positive – so energy and maintenance savings are greater than the annual repayments.

One of the best forums I have been involved in occurred on 24th February 2014 at Maribyrnong Council in the west of Melbourne. The Australian Institute of Traffic Planning and Management brought 4 great speakers together. As always the panel discussion at the end was most interesting for me. After some warm up questions the topic got around to LEDs. In particular how do traffic managers deal with the constant technical challenge of new lighting types and options. The discussion moved to the role...

As of last week, 72 of Victoria's 79 councils have signed up for free to be part of a standing panel of approved lights that allows councils to purchase hardware directly without going out to tender, even if it's over the Local Government Act threshold. This panel was set up to leverage the combined purchasing power of councils to achieve cost savings. We have already seen councils save hundreds of thousands of dollar on purchasing lights and thousands of council hours on developing and...

Powercor and Citipower have approved a 19W LED which represents a massive 77% reduction in energy use compared with an 80W Mercury Vapour light. Since September 2013 Ironbark have developed updated LED Business Cases, financial and technical feasibility studies for 27 councils in the Powercor and Citipower areas, and we're aware of nearly a dozen who are planning in installing LEDs in the next 6-12 months. What's more, the 72 councils that are signatories to the MAV standing materials panel will...

Ironbark have been engaged to develop project plans for 35 of the 39 Victorian councils who were successful in round two of the Community Energy Efficiency Program (CEEP) and we’re thrilled that by late 2013, the first of these dozens of project plans have been official accepted by the Federal Department of Industry. This is great news for those councils as it's onto Milestone 3 and savings money, energy and emissions.

Councils in Victoria are leading the way when it comes to changing to more energy efficient street lights. However over the last few years councils making that change have been receiving information from organisations that want to provide an alternative street lighting management service to energy distribution businesses. Some of the claims and threats around "vesting" (or "gifting") of the new assets are certainly bordering on the extreme, so we decided to (again) investigate the issue of...