Next time you drive down the road count how many public lights you see. If you live in an average sized city, you will be able to count hundreds if not thousands of street lights, stop lights, crosswalk signs, blinking street lights, etc. In a large city there are tens of thousands of these lights. All using energy, all paid for by your tax dollars, not to mention all the coal/gas/oil that needs to be burned to power them.

The people of Bristol England no longer have to deal with these problems, no they didn’t tear up all the lights (although some who like a star filled sky might want them too), they instead began powering all of their street lights with renewable energy.

From here.

Bristol has taken a significant step towards tackling climate change by becoming one of the first major cities in the UK to power its street lights with 100% “green” energy.

The city council has secured a contract with Eon Energy to purchase 22575063 KWH of energy a year generated through renewable sources such as wind, wave and solar power.

The contract came into force in January 2007.

Whilst higher energy prices overall mean that the council’s bill for street lighting will have had to rise, the deal that the council has been able to negotiate is some £500,000-a-year less than the worst case scenario some experts were predicting.

Bristol has 34000 street lighting lanterns, by purchasing 100% renewable energy the council will achieve a 15% reduction in its CO2 emissions by Spring 2008 – three years earlier than originally targeted.

…

“This follows on from other recent Council initiatives, such as boosting recycling to 40% of all household waste – believed to be the best performance of any major UK city – and our innovative introduction of energy-saving biomass boilers, solar panels and environmentally-friendly lighting systems in many of our buildings and facilities.”

If you are going to pay taxes for public lighting, ask yourself, would you rather pay a bit more for clean safe energy, or would you rather pay less and have dirty air, have your money go to crazy countries, and help further accelerate global warming? I think they made the right choice. Look for many more cities to go this way. As co2 reduction becomes more and more a goal of people this is an easy way to do so fast.