Effective Control of Road Luminaires—A Case Study on an Example of a Selected City in Poland

According to various estimates, street lighting in Poland consumes between 1.500 and 2.500 GWh per year and is responsible for some greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation. Also on the basis of estimates, it is estimated that approximately 3.3 million road and street luminaires are used in Poland. The increase in electricity costs, on the one hand, and the technical possibilities in the field of lighting, on the other, force the search for new solutions aimed at saving during the operation of electrical devices and installations, including road lighting installations. One of the methods of saving electricity is to replace the luminaires with energy-saving ones with LED sources, but also with new sodium and metal halide sources. The latter solution is cheaper and allows us to keep existing poles, electrical installation and luminaire heads if their technical parameters have not been degraded. The new and already used luminaires with discharge sources can be used in road lighting, provided that they meet the requirements of Polish law and the EU regulations. Like luminaires with LED sources, they can have an adjustable value of the emitted luminous flux, which allows us to save electricity. One of the methods of saving electricity in road installations is their effective lighting control. Such control can take place at very different levels, from the manual setting of the required light intensity using dimmers to full automation taking into account other factors influencing the operation of the road lighting system, e.g., time of day, intensity of external light, presence of road users, weather conditions and others. The article describes both of the above-mentioned methods, describing their advantages and disadvantages on the basis of actual measurements of working road installations, and analyzes the annual operation of a modernized road lighting installation with automatic lighting control in one of the selected cities in Poland.