COMHAIRLE CONTAE ÁTHA CLIATH THEAS
SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

South Dublin County Council Crest

MEETING OF LUCAN / PALMERSTOWN / NORTH CLONDALKIN AREA COMMITTEE

Tuesday, April 25, 2023

QUESTION NO. 13

QUESTION: Councillor Derren Ó Brádaigh

"To ask the manager for an update on the progress of the LED public lighting programme, that also details any challenges that may have emerged during the ongoing transition."

REPLY:

To date, the Council has upgraded 17,500 (SOX) public lights to LED throughout the County but about 8,000 of these SOX public lights remain.  These 8,000 lights are some of the trickiest to upgrade as they are old and are not compliant with current regulations. Resolving this issue with ESBN has been slow and has impacted on our upgrade programme. We have been working with ESBN this issue and in January 2023 finally signed an agreement with ESBN on how we can jointly address the technical and safety issues presented by these lights. We are now able to move forward again with our programme in conjunction with ESBN. To test our agreed new way of working with the ESBN we have agreed to progress upgrades in three estates across the County in locations that cover all manner of issues which we are likely to face as we upgrade our remaining stock. These three pilot estates include works to Rathfarnham Wood, which is due to commence in April, and at Redwood Kilnamanagh and at Ashwood Clondalkin, both of which will follow in due course. Once these works are completed, we will understand all the likely issues and based on that information we will be able to agree a more ambitious upgrade programme with the ESBN.

Regarding the continued maintenance of the remaining SOX fittings, these are now obsolete, and it is extremely difficult to source parts to maintain them.

To address this problem, we have been able to harvest lamps and other maintenance parts from the old SOX fittings that we retire as our upgrade/replacement programme progresses. Now that this will shortly recommence,  it will allow us to resume our harvesting of old SOX parts.  As a priority, we will then accelerate the repair of all outages that are reported to us.  

Please note that there are other reasons a lighting column may be out of order and may need a reconnection of supply by ESBN.  In these cases, the timeline of repair is entirely up to ESBN and their work schedules.