Ten lakh street lights in Gram Panchayats of seven districts of Andhra Pradesh using conventional lights will be replaced by LED lights. Once this programme is completed the panchayats will save approximately 147 million units of electricity every year. As per officials this will reduce emission of some 12 crore tonnes of CO2 and monetary saving of about 88.2 crore Rupees annually.
AP Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu has a target of replacing 30 lakh conventional street lights with LED in villages across the state.
Andhra Pradesh was the first state to seek assistance from EESL to replace conventional street lighting with LED lighting in Visakhapatnam, after the cyclone Hudhud caused extensive damage to the then existing street lighting infrastructure. Ever since then, EESL has installed over 5,90,000 LED street lights in the State. These installations have led to an annual savings of over 7.8 crore kWh, translating into an annual reduction of over 65,000 tonnes of CO2.
The entire upfront capital cost of this project is being funded by French Development Agency Agence Française de Développement (AFD). As part of the project, EESL would be carrying out the entire annual maintenance and warranty replacement in these gram panchayats for a period of 10 years.
It may be mentioned that this Andhra Pradesh project for rural LED street lighting is the first of its kind in the country under Street Lighting National Project. Under this national project the aim is to replace 1.34 crore conventional street lights with LED lights across the country.
Union Power Minister Piyush Goyal in his tweet has said "Laud Shri @ncbn for initiating the installation of 10 lakh LED streetlights in the Gram Panchayats of Andhra Pradesh"
