By: Precious Mills
BASSETERRE, St.Kitts (Friday 24th April 2020) — With the changeover of the street lights to the eco-friendly Light Emitting Diode (LED) ones in the Streetlight and Floodlight Retrofit Project handled by the St. Kitts Electricity Company Ltd. (SKELEC), the old lamps are expected to be disposed of via an environmentally safe process.
The eco-friendly street lights are currently being installed in the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis in a $15.6 million project rolled out through a loan provided by the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB). The two-phase scheme is expected to see some 10,760 lamps altogether installed on both islands.
Renewable Energy Special Projects and Planning Engineer Rondel Phillip of SKELEC explained the disposal process: “Basically what we’ll be doing is changing over the bulbs. We have the high pressure sodium bulbs, mercury bulbs and what we’ll be doing is the arc tube is what we’re going to be shipping back overseas for disposal. The vapours within these tubes are harmful once inhaled or once exposed into the atmosphere so that’s the main reason for changing them out.”
SKELEC General Manager Clement Jomo Williams said the company has taken a proactive approach to the project: “Even before we started rolling out the CBD project, we have been changing over LEDs for over two years now so when the project started we had some almost 6,000 lights allocated and since, we have changed approximately a thousand of these.”
Minister of Public Infrastructure Ian ‘Patches’ Liburd spoke about the safety and energy saving benefits: “It is important to note — apart from the environmental benefits — from a fiscal standpoint, in the long term, the government would be reducing its cost for lighting our streets… to provide street lighting costs the government millions of dollars each year and we’re going to be reducing that cost through this project.”