Street smarts

Street smarts is an energy efficiency project located across a broad, distributed area spanning the Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia. Because of the multi-state nature of this infrastructure initiative, it lacks a single set of geographic coordinates or a specific localized project area size. Instead, it encompasses various public roadways and spaces across numerous cities and towns within these states, meaning the primary regional land use is built environment and municipal infrastructure rather than agriculture or forestry. The project was registered on December 20, 2017.

Commercial and Public Lighting projects under the ACCU scheme involve upgrading existing lighting systems to high-efficiency alternatives to reduce electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Standard requirements for this methodology involve modifying or replacing the lighting system of a road or public space, carefully calculating energy savings against a baseline, and verifying the reduction in electricity consumption drawn from the power grid. In this project, the core activity is the installation of LED luminaires to replace older, less efficient public lighting setups.

Given that this project is distributed across four distinct states, the environmental conditions vary extensively. The operational areas encompass the high rainfall, monsoonal climates and lateritic soils of the tropical north, all the way to the semi-arid, Mediterranean environments and sandy clay soils of South Australia and Western Australia. However, unlike traditional vegetation or soil carbon projects, this energy efficiency initiative is not reliant on specific soil types or rainfall patterns to sequester carbon, as it relies strictly on reducing electricity usage from urban infrastructure.

An interesting administrative note regarding this project is that its project proponent has been updated over time. On May 20, 2020, there was an official variation to the participant name, transferring from Australian Integrated Carbon Financial Services Pty Ltd to Emissions Reduction Group Pty Ltd.