Buildings are the most energy-demanding sector in cities and for that reason are the targets of many energy saving initiatives. In order to comply with its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2025, Copenhagen Municipality launched a set of targets. One of them consists in reducing in 40% its buildings energy consumption, in comparison with values from 2010. In this context, the Municipality has been developing a pilot project - Copenhagen Efficient Light Project (CELP) - which consists on retrofitting the lighting system of all municipal buildings by installing new highly energy efficient LED luminaires.
Inspired by the pilot project the Municipality is carrying out, this report aims at understanding the benefits a transition to LED lighting system in the municipal buildings could bring to the City of Copenhagen. In this way, three distinguish studies have been performed in this report: (1) cost-benefits analysis of the implementation of CELP in four different groups of municipal buildings; (2) estimation of the total energy savings if the special LED luminaires designed for CELP would replace the luminaires in every building in the City of Copenhagen; (3) two cost-benefit analyses of the lighting system retrofitting at a private household by (a) replacing the luminaires by the new ones designed for CELP and (b) by replacing only the light bulbs by LED bulbs that could be found at a Danish supermarket.
Further, concepts from the Multi-Level Perspective theory are used, together with the results from the three studies conducted in this report, in order to understand if a sustainable transition within the indoor lighting field could be triggered by CELP, and how.
The results from this project suggest that considerable amounts of electricity could be saved if indoor LED lighting would be implemented at a large scale. However, with the LED bulbs available nowadays at the market, when lights are used for few hours per day (in households), LED bulbs represent high advantages only over halogen lamps, but not yet over compact fluorescent lamps.
Nevertheless, this report concludes that, due to its high potential for electricity savings, indoor lighting is an important field to research.