An Oxford academic is claiming that energy efficient lighting has played a significant role in reducing energy demand in Britain and will help to militate against the threat of full-blown power cuts as the nation's ageing power stations are mothballed.
Brenda Boardman of the University of Oxford's Environmental Change Institute revealed, in a talk at the Radical Emission Reduction Conference at the Royal Society in December, that the UK has 'passed peak light bulb.' This means the average amount of electricity needed annually to light a UK home has fallen from 720kWh in 2007 to 508kWh in 2012 – a 31 per cent reduction in 15 years.
Boardman credited the phase out of incandescent lamps for the reduction in peak demand and argued that it would make it easier for the UK to maintain its electricity supply as the most polluting coal-fired power stations are mothballed and the country waits for energy from renewables and new nuclear power stations to kick in. As reported in the April issue of Lighting, the risk of power shortages has risen recently after power stations such as the Kingsnorth plant in Kent have been closed owing to new EU pollution laws.
Power shortages are most likely at times of peak demand. The electricity grid is designed with enough capacity to cope with this brief peak and because lighting is such a big contributor to peak demand, Boardman argued that it represents the low-hanging fruit in terms of energy reduction policies.
"Lighting is a big contributor to peak demand – that's completely understandable," she told Lighting. "If you think about the shortest day which falls in December, it gets dark in the early afternoon, the lights come on, the Christmas lights come on and you've got this very temporary demand with little overlap for other parts of the day. It's the peak that determines the size of the whole system, so anything that cuts the size of peak demand – such as low-energy light bulbs – reduces the risk of a power shortage."
Peak demand fell from 61.5 gigawatts to 57.5 gigawatts between 2007 and 2012 and Boardman argues that this coincided with the timed phase out of incandescent lamps. She went on to suggest that newspaper stories that talked about the threat of blackouts were inaccurate in the main, because the National Grid would merely reduce power rather than switching it off altogether if there was a shortage of capacity. This would cause lighting to dim but not go out completely.
