SSROC established and oversees the award-winning Street Lighting Improvement (SLI) Program to implement the recommendations of an extensive review of street lighting undertaken by its members.  

There are currently 29 councils participating in the Program, ranging from southern Sydney through to the Central Coast and Hunter.  Collectively, the 230,000+ street lights in the participating councils’ jurisdictions constitute over 90% of Ausgrid’s street lights and councils pay more than $50m per year for street lighting services and energy.  

Federal Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, has acknowledged the efforts of the SSROC member councils, stating that Program for Energy and Environmental Risk Solutions (PEERS) and Street Lighting Improvement Program “strongly align with the Australian Government’s focus on reducing emissions and ensuring Australians have access to affordable and reliable energy.”  

The key areas of progress to date include:  

• Securing reform and increased funding for the NSW Traffic Route Lighting Subsidy Scheme;   

• Securing a mandatory NSW Public Lighting Code; and   

• Securing improved street lighting maintenance and information provision for councils.  

Recognising the strong environmental gains made, the SSROC SLI Program won a 2023 LGNSW Excellence in the Environment Award and a 2024 IPWEA Engineering Excellence Award. 

The main issues that councils are seeking further progress on include:  

• LED Lighting – With Australia’s largest residential and main road LED program largely complete, the focus is now on the replacement of remaining floodlights and legacy decorative lighting with modern LEDs. 

• Smart Controls Adoption & Links to Smart City Technology – As part of main road LED upgrades, councils in the SLI Program have worked jointly with Ausgrid to deploy 62,000+ smart street lighting controls and explore the case for even wider deployment. The new street lights also have Zhaga Book 18 interfaces on the underside so that smart city sensors that can be integrated with street lighting. SSROC is progressing agreement with Ausgrid on both smart controls and sensors..  

• NSW Public Lighting Code Compliance – The Code is a mandatory license condition for the NSW Distributed Network Service Providers (DNSP). SLI Program participants want to ensure that Ausgrid remains in full compliance with the Code and secure NSW Government support for improvements to it and to Ausgrid’s associated lighting documents.   

• Pricing and Pricing Oversight – Oversight of street lighting pricing sits with the Australian Energy Regulator (AER). The SLI Program engages with Ausgrid and the AER to ensure that councils’ interests are properly considered as the pricing regime evolves and that they can make well informed representations to the AER in pricing decisions.       

• Increased Engagement with Ausgrid – The SLI team is working to increase council engagement with the Ausgrid management team across the full range of street lighting and other issues on which the organisations need to work together.  

For more information on the SLI Program, please contact Program Managers, Graham Mawer on 0412 229 544 or gmawer@nextenergy.com.au or Paul Gowans on 0448 404 749 or pgowans@nextenergy.com.au