In the US alone, more than 52 million streetlights might need replacing over the next few decades. So how are cities looking to get a bigger bang for their streetlighting bucks?

• Trading in for more efficiency – Chicago is replacing many of its old sodium-vapor streetlights with metal-halide lamps that are 33 percent more energy efficient.
• Going solar – Chennai, India, expects to cut its streetlight energy consumption by 25 percent by replacing 60,000 streetlights with LEDs, compact fluorescents and other efficient technologies, including 25,000 solar-powered lights.
• Alternate lighting – Ahmedabad, India, is installing solar power plants and efficient streetlighting, but also aims to save money and energy through a program in which alternate lights are turned off on some streets depending on the time and traffic levels.
• Switching off lights late at night – Hertfordshire in the UK has begun switching off most of its streetlights entirely after midnight and, so far, reports the plan hasn’t caused any uptick in crime.
• Ditching light poles completely – The Dutch city of Eindhoven has started using Philips’ new FreeStreet lighting system, which features strings of LEDs on narrow cables instead of streetlight poles. The “floating” lights are not only energy efficient but help to declutter streets and free up public space, according to Philips.
• New fees – The Ohio town of Millersburg is considering charging citizens a separate fee to cover the cost of keeping streetlights on. If that doesn’t go through, the city might either switch lights off or pull some out completely.
• Opting for a buyback – Some cities don’t maintain all their own streetlights, but rely on a utility company or other operator to take care of them. At least one town — Syracuse — has found that buying back streetlights, along with upgrading them to a more efficient type, will save money over time.
• Adding smarts – The Vietnamese city of Hanoi is among those looking to make streetlights not only more efficient but more intelligent. The system it’s using from Echelon will enable the city to control lighting from a data center and even extend the network’s capabilities to do things like manage traffic lights, monitor street noise and collect data on pollution.

While it sounds almost trite today from an individual perspective, switching to more efficient lighting technologies really can make a big difference in energy, money and carbon savings when done on a large scale. And, increasingly, that switch is being made on a large scale.

A growing number of big cities across the globe are replacing their inefficient street-lighting systems with far more efficient LEDs (light-emitting diodes). Los Angeles, for example, is working on what it says is “the largest LED green street light program ever undertaken by a city.” Once completed, the green street light program, which aims to replace 140,000 street lights with LEDs, is expected to cut the city’s energy bills by 40 percent and reduce carbon emissions by 40,500 tons a year. Right behind Los Angeles is Seattle, which has so far installed 20,000 LED lights across the city and expects to add another 21,000 lights in the near term.

Other large-scale rollouts of LED street lights are taking place in Guangzhou, Dongguan and Tianjin, China; and Anchorage, Alaska. Many other cities are pursuing trials: New York City; Mumbai, India; London; Kolkata, India; Toronto, Ontario; and Haldia, India.

And now Sydney is on track to become the first city in Australia to install LED street and park lights across its entire central area.

Part of a three-year, $7-million joint venture with GE and UGL Limited, new LED lights are now being installed around Sydney’s Town Hall.

“Replacing 6,450 conventional lights will save nearly $800,000 a year in electricity bills and maintenance costs,” said Lord Mayor Clover Moore.

Sydney is one of the largest users of street lighting in New South Wales, with 22,000 lights total — 13,5000 maintained by the utility Ausgrid and 8,500 operated by the city. Public lighting accounts for a full third of the city’s annual electricity use and 30 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions.

The transition is one more step toward Sydney’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent by 2030. It has already become the first carbon-neutral government in Australia.

The increasing adoption of LEDs for street lighting is also a clear indication that the efficient lighting technology — still considered cutting-edge and unaffordable just a few years ago — has reached a tipping point. As Caroline Bayliss, The Climate Group’s Australian director, noted, “LED technology is ready.”

Wrong.

As good a thing as it is, energy efficiency alone won’t help us “leave oil before it leaves us” or keep global warming below 2 degrees C. And even efforts to expand renewable energy supplies — which we already know aren’t proceeding quickly enough — don’t make as large a dent in our dependence on fossil fuels as we might hope.

In fact, University of Oregon sociologist Richard York has found, every 10 units of clean energy we’ve added so far have managed to displace just one unit of fossil-fuel-based energy. Call it part Jevons Paradox, part the flip side of the “resource curse,” but York’s finding boils down to this: without any other policies in place to actually reduce fossil-fuel use, expanding renewables basically just gives us more energy to use … so we do.

“I’m not saying that, in principle, we can’t have displacement with these new technologies, but it is interesting that so far it has not happened,” York said. “One reason the results seem surprising is that we, as societies, tend to see demand as an exogenous thing that generates supply, but supply also generates demand. Generating electricity creates the potential to use that energy, so creating new energy technologies often leads to yet more energy consumption.”

When you think about human behavior, that’s really not so surprising. We’ve seen the same results in many other areas where, as we’ve figured out how to do more with less, our response has been to say, “Even more, please.” Think improved-mileage “autos on steroids.”  Think “green” McMansions. Think “roads cause traffic.”

So what’s the answer? Stop making cars, houses, roads and buses? Stop building more wind turbines and putting up more solar panels? Of course not. The solution, though, is the one thing that most political leaders have so far failed to do: create policies that actually require us to do less with less, at least as far as fossil fuels are concerned.

“In terms of governmental policies, we need to be thinking about social context, not just the technology,” said York. “We need to be asking what political and economic factors are conducive to seeing real displacement. Just developing non-fossil fuel sources doesn’t in itself tend to reduce fossil fuel use a lot — not enough. We need to be thinking about suppressing fossil fuel use rather than just coming up with alternatives alone.”

Odds of that happening? Sadly, a lot of scientists aren’t feeling too confident.

Here at Carbon Voyage, we have just launched a collaborative transport service with Earls Court and Olympia, two of the United Kingdom’s biggest event venues that play host to millions of visitors and tens of thousands of exhibitors each year with big events such as the Ideal Home Show and London Book Fair. Not surprisingly, the transport associated with this creates significant congestion problems and is a major element in event-related carbon emissions. At any major transport hub or big event, it is common to see big queues of people trying to get a cab (many in the same direction), big queues of cabs waiting to pick up one person at a time, and lots of trucks showing up half empty and leaving empty.

What this situation highlights is that a lot of the congestion and carbon impacts don’t need to happen because many journeys are taken individually without any reference to who may be taking similar journeys. This is partly why 1/3 of all truck journeys are completely empty and 60% of all car trips have only the driver — and unsurprisingly this means that people are paying for this inefficiency.

Collaborative consumption is a movement that tries to address these inefficiencies that exist in everyday life, as we see with companies such as Airbnb and Zipcar: Can I hire out my spare room? Do I really need a car that sits in the driveway? or even, Can I hire out my empty driveway to someone looking for a parking spot? As the world increasingly becomes a resource-constrained place due to population growth and urbanization, finding efficiencies through shared use could move from being a nice-to-have to a must-have.

In the context of transport, this becomes a crucial issue because of space constraints. Collaboration also helps with mode shift — finding better ways of moving groups of people. In the case of Earls Court, by matching demand for people wanting to go to the same airport, a bus can not only be a third to half the cost of a taxi, but also is quicker because there are fewer vehicles queuing up to transport people.

Congestion is a multi-billion-pound problem in London alone. Collaborating with others is one of the very few ways of addressing this — unless, of course, we all stop moving around.

Editor’s note: This was a guest commentary by James Swanston, who is the founder of Carbon Voyage and an army officer in his spare time. You can follow Carbon Voyage on Twitter (@carbonvoyage).

The policies and investment decisions being made today “do not adequately address energy savings opportunities in the industrial sector,” according to the Industrial Energy Efficiency Coalition (IEEC).

Not surprisingly, the group’s founding members specialize in control and automation technologies designed to improve energy efficiency. Among them: ABB, Eaton, GE, Rockwell Automation, Schneider Electric and Siemens, which together provide about 75 percent of the industrial controls bought by US companies. But even if it’s motivated by the quest for new business, a drive for industrial efficiency is worth pursuing if you look at the numbers.

US industry uses more energy than any other sector (the rest are residential, commercial and transportation) — a total of 30.26 quadrillion Btus (British thermal units) in 2010, according to the most recent data available from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Industrial users would actually take second place, behind transportation, if it weren’t for wasted energy: electricity-related losses accounted for a full 6.89 quadrillion Btus of industry consumption in 2010.

Better automation and control technologies could help reduce those losses considerably, according to the IEEC. Over the next 25 years, such improvements could help the US industrial sector cut its energy footprint by 25 to 30 percent.

Meanwhile, if there’s any wonder why there’s been such an increasingly aggressive push for smart-grid technology in homes and businesses, here’s why: electricity-related losses in the residential and commercial sectors are even worse than those for industry: 10.39 quadrillion Btus out of a total 22.05 quadrillion Btus consumed for residential, and  9.52 quadrillion Btus out of a total 18.22 quadrillion Btus consumed for commercial.

In the US especially, where a certain proportion of people has always viewed any government regulations as an intrusion on personal rights, utilities from California to Maryland are letting smart-meter opponents opt out of the advanced technology … for a fee. Having to pay more to keep a “dumb” meter doesn’t always sit well with opt-out customers, but it does seem fair considering everyone else would otherwise have to foot the bill for the extra time and effort involved in reading meters the old-fashioned way.

In other words, if you have the money, go ahead … be inefficient but be ready to pay.

On the flip side, there are times when efficiency is — in the short term, anyway — the more expensive way to go. Not all of us can afford a Prius, for example, or an array of solar panels on the roof of our home. In cases like these, inefficiency isn’t always a choice … it’s just the more affordable option, even if it costs more in the long run.

Ultimately, unconstrained choice with incentives for making efficient choices might not be enough to get us to a smarter, lower-carbon energy future, notes UK science adviser David J.C. MacKay, the Cambridge professor who wrote the highly regarded book, “Sustainable energy – without the hot air”:

“Perhaps a better legislative tactic would be to enforce reasonable energy-efficiency, rather than continuing to allow unconstrained choice; for example, we could simply ban, from a certain date, the sale of any car whose energy consumption is more than 80 kWh per 100 km; and then, over time, reduce this ceiling to 60 kWh per 100 km, then 40 kWh per 100 km, and beyond. Alternatively, to give the consumer more choice, regulations could force car manufacturers to reduce the average energy consumption of all the cars they sell … People today choose their cars to make fashion statements. With strong efficiency legislation, there could still be a wide choice of fashions; they’d all just happen to be energy-efficient. You could choose any colour, as long as it was green.”

That’s the challenge facing the US Air Force, which is tasked not only with a defense mission but now also has to meet presidential executive orders to manage its assets more effectively, improve energy efficiency, and cut consumption, waste and carbon emissions.

The key to achieving those goals on such a massive scale is, as Sherlock Holmes would say, “data, data, data.”

To get better insights into how its properties use energy and other resources, the Air Force plans to use a program called TRIRIGA. Developed by a company of the same name that was acquired last year by IBM, TRIRIGA will provide the Air Force with a single system for overseeing its building management decisions.

The software is designed to crunch and analyze all the energy-use, heating, lighting, water, sewer and other data coming in from all the Air Force’s properties around the globe, and to identify ways where operations could be made more efficient.

Those ways could include pinpointing old equipment that should be replaced before problems occur, buildings where space is going unused and wasted, and facilities where energy use or waste production is higher than average.

The software could also, for example, help the Air Force decide whether it makes more dollars-and-cents sense to replace a roof on a building rather than replace the heating, ventilation and air conditioning system.

“Having the right data at the right time is essential for US Air Force personnel,” said George Ahn, vice president of Enterprise Asset Management for IBM. The TRIRIGA platform, he continued, “infuses a new level of intelligence to physical infrastructures that will enable US Air Force to make the timely and critical decisions about their assets that are essential to the success of their operations.”

Europe has ambitious 2020 climate and energy goals — a 20 percent reduction in primary energy use, a 20 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions and 20 percent of energy coming from renewable sources — but it isn’t improving as much as it should be in some areas. That’s particularly true when it comes to making buildings more energy efficient, which is all but a no-brainer for better sustainability.

“Buildings are responsible for 40 percent of Europe’s energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, so overhauling their energy efficiency represents the greatest opportunity for energy saving and greenhouse gas reduction,” says Bruce Tofield, an associate consultant at the University of East Anglia’s Adapt Low Carbon Group.

Radically improving the energy efficiency of buildings is vital for cutting global greenhouse gas emissions, write Tofield and colleague Martin Ingham in a new report published by the Build with CaRe consortium. And Europe could lead the way by aiming for a 40-percent cut in primary energy demand by 2050 and making building efficiency a key strategy for achieving that goal, they say.

“At present, across most of the EU, the political will to act on energy efficiency seems to be lacking,” they write in “Refurbishing Europe: An EU Strategy for Energy Efficiency and Climate Action Led by Building Refurbishment.”

“Energy efficiency has delivered far more greenhouse gas saving in recent decades than has been, or will be, achieved by transformation of energy supply,” they continue. “Yet energy efficiency is still relatively ignored by governments compared to energy supply.”

It’s not that we don’t know how to make buildings far more energy-efficient. Passivhaus innovations, which were first developed in Europe, could not only help to dramatically cut energy use but could improve the quality of life for many people who currently live in inefficient buildings, Tofield and Ingham say.

Brian Smithers, business development director at the electrical supply distributor Rexel UK, which has developed a sustainable home at the BRE Innovation Park, agrees. He adds that more needs to be done to educate people about the hows and whys of energy efficiency.

“Yes, the targets suggested by Build with CaRe are ambitious, but in terms of technology we have everything we need to radically improve the energy efficiency of new and existing buildings,” Smithers says. “It’s a lack of awareness that is really hampering greater energy efficiency as neither consumers nor even sometimes people in the industry have access to the information they need.”

Current policies, standards and incentives aren’t always effective, Tofield and Ingham say. For example, the UK’s standards for zero-carbon homes after 2016 aren’t strong enough to ensure that homes will actually be zero-carbon. Such weak standards not only contribute to ongoing greenhouse gas emissions but reduce the benefits expected from the development of renewable energy and could actually lead to poor ventilation and air-quality problems for homeowners.

In the case of the UK’s weakened zero-carbon standards, the changes were made in the mistaken notion that easing regulations will stimulate the struggling economy, Tofield and Ingham say.

“Such thinking is misguided,” they continue. “Weakening of standards disadvantages the innovators that are the only hope for a competitive, prosperous, green economy in favour of businesses that are reluctant to change or to innovate. The weakening of environmental standards ensures that the economy will be weaker in the future and less competitive than it could be.”

Instead, they say, governments need to set effective targets — and specified actions — for energy efficiency, invest in training and skills development on passivhaus standards, and start thinking in innovative ways about how to financially support “deep” refurbishment.

Of course, governments will actually have to listen to reports like this first. Here’s hoping …

But an interesting fact emerges from the latest list of US Energy Star Leaders, organizations singled out by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for having done the most to improve the energy efficiency of their buildings: most of them are public schools.

Out of 210 organizations the EPA has recognized as Energy Star Leaders since 2004, 176 (84 percent) fall under the category “K-12 education.”

Certainly, businesses that made the list operate numerous buildings across the country Food Lion, Giant Eagle, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, Office Depot and Staples. Staples, for instance, runs more than 1,500 retail stores and 200 distribution centers, and had achieved Energy Star status for more than 140 of those facilities as of early 2011. But it shouldn’t be surprising that school districts are feeling a special motivation to reduce their energy consumption (and bills) these days, as a few sample headlines from just the past few days illustrate (“Pittsburgh Public Schools Told to Find More to Cut,” “Schools Close Doors as Budgets Tighten” and “Haley’s Proposal Would Cut Money for Education”).

Schools are often first on the chopping block when states need to cut spending, according to “The Fiscal Survey of States,” a spring 2011 report by the National Governors Association and the National Association of State Budget Officers. “Out of the 23 states that made mid-year cuts, 18 states reduced K-12 education, and 18 states cut higher education.”

Across the US, those mid-year budget cuts added up to $1.8 billion K-12 schools and $1.2 billion for higher education.

That probably helps to explain not only why there are so many school districts among the EPA’s Energy Star Leaders, but why the first leader to improve efficiency by a massive 60 percent was Indiana’s Decatur County Community Schools. According to the EPA, that relatively small district’s (with some 2,500 students) efficiency efforts have helped it to save more than $1 million in energy costs so far.

“I’m hugely enthusiastic about energy efficiency,” said Edward Davey in his first speech since replacing Chris Huhne, who resigned in the wake of questions regarding speeding charges against him. “It’s the cheapest way of cutting carbon — and cutting bills for consumers. It has to be right at the heart of what we do.”

The concept of energy efficiency is a fairly simple one. Basically, the more closely energy into something (a car, a data center, an air conditioner, an Xbox, etc.) matches that something’s useful energy output (“useful” meaning you don’t include losses from heat, friction, and so on), the more energy efficient it is. Achieving optimal energy efficiency, on the other hand, isn’t always so easy.

Energy efficiency is sometimes called “the fifth fuel” because of its large potential for contributing to stable energy supplies. (The first four fuels are oil, coal, nuclear and renewables.) Efficiency was one of the key strategies identified by Princeton researchers Robert Socolow and Steve Pacala when they developed their climate stabilization wedge game in 2004. Physicist Arthur Rosenfeld, a long-time influential member of the California Energy Commission, made energy efficiency a lifetime quest … to the point a unit of energy savings (the “Rosenfeld”) has been named after him.

So how big an impact could efficiency really have on our global energy appetite?

• At the grid level, a really big one. In the US, less-than-perfect powerline insulation leads to an average 7 percent loss in electricity from starting point to ending point. (“It’s like going to the market and buying a full container of milk and then arriving at home to see a glassful has disappeared,” says IBM researcher Philip Shemella.) Add in the inefficiencies in power generation, and those losses go even higher: “In 2010, 24 per cent of UK primary energy demand was lost through energy generation, transformation and distribution losses,” notes the British government’s brief on the importance of energy efficiency.
• At the other end of the scale — our homes — efficiency can also make a significant dent. The drain of standby power for all those devices we leave plugged in 24/7, even when they’re not in use, amounts to up to 10 percent of total residential energy demand, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). And this problem, writes Cambridge’s David MacKay (author of the brilliant book, “Sustainable energy — without the hot air”) can be boiled down to a different inefficiency: penny-wise, pound-foolish manufacturing. “It’s perfectly possible to make standby systems that draw less than 0.01 W; but manufacturers, saving themselves a penny in the manufacturing costs, are saddling the consumer with an annual cost of pounds,” MacKay states.
• And in terms of global greenhouse gas emissions, the impact of energy efficiency could be nothing short of huge, leading to reductions of 25 to 40 percent.

Efficiency has already put us in a better place than we could be. Without better insulation and home heating improvements, British homes today would be consuming twice as much energy as they did in 1970, according to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). But clearly we could do a lot better. Why haven’t we yet?

Society’s endless pursuit of growth.

In its 2004 report, “Growth isn’t Possible,” the new economics foundation compared the endless pursuit of growth to an “impossible hamster.” A newborn hamster, the report explains, might grow rapidly in its first weeks, doubling its weight every week until it hits puberty. If it kept growing at that rate, though, the rodent would weigh nine billion tons by its first birthday.

The quest for continued economic growth includes not just more stuff, but endlessly bigger and better stuff. That’s why cars, electronic devices, households and more stay energy-hungry despite all the individual efficiency improvements that have been made to them. It’s human nature, it seems, to keep wanting more … and it doesn’t help when that tendency joins up with conspiracy theories about green energy and smart technology.

Can we efficiency our way out of that? There’s the question.