Street smarts

Street smarts is a Commercial and Public Lighting carbon project located in the Adelaide metropolitan region of South Australia. Registered in December 2017, the project is an aggregation of street lighting upgrades across several local government areas, most notably involving a consortium of the City of Marion, City of Mitcham, and the City of Charles Sturt. The project proponent, Emissions Reduction Group Pty Ltd (formerly Australian Integrated Carbon Financial Services Pty Ltd), is based in Adelaide and facilitates the generation of carbon credits from these energy-efficiency improvements.

The project operates under the Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative, Commercial and Public Lighting) Methodology Determination 2015. This methodology credits emissions reductions achieved by improving the energy performance of lighting systems in public spaces, roads, or commercial buildings. Specifically, this project involves replacing older, inefficient street lighting technologies, such as mercury vapour or high-pressure sodium lamps, with energy-efficient Light Emitting Diode (LED) luminaires. By reducing electricity consumption, the project lowers the scope 2 emissions associated with powering the municipality's infrastructure.

Geographically, the project covers the urban and suburban built environments of Adelaide. The region is characterized by a Mediterranean climate, featuring hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters. While soil types in the Adelaide Plains include red-brown earths and clays, the project's activities are strictly infrastructure-based and do not interact with agricultural land systems. The area is heavily urbanized, consisting primarily of residential, commercial, and transport corridor land uses.

An interesting feature of this project is its collaborative nature. The participation of the City of Marion, City of Mitcham, and City of Charles Sturt marked one of the first local government consortia in Australia to jointly utilize the Emissions Reduction Fund for street lighting. This approach allowed the councils to aggregate their abatement potential, making the administrative costs of the carbon project more viable while generating revenue to offset the cost of the infrastructure upgrade. The upgrades in the City of Marion alone involved replacing over 8,000 street lights, projected to save millions in energy costs over the asset lifespan.