Municipal services aim to create an image of the city at night that strikes a balance between function and style. In order to move towards a more sustainable and efficient city, they are incorporating new lighting technology, such as LED, but also management elements such as regulation, the possibility of remote control, and new technological solutions in general.
The city’s streets are becoming brighter, not because they have more light but because the light is better distributed.The city is committed to greater energy efficiency with the incorporation of the best lighting technologies on the market.
The current lighting criteria are aimed at caring for pedestrians, integrating sustainable mobility, reconsidering the urban green infrastructure and enhancing classic or iconographic architectural values. In the past, lighting was centred on the horizontal plane, mainly on traffic routes, especially for vehicles, with an occasional focus on some emblematic buildings.
Barcelona has more than 146,000 points of light, including street and artistic lighting; an unbalanced distribution which is the fruit of urban renovations and isolated maintenance, leading to a wide variety of criteria, models and results.
Public lighting has 17,600 kW of installed electrical power and annual electrical consumption is around 82,000 MWh/year, or 54 kWh/year per inhabitant. This is 20% of the total energy consumed by Barcelona City Council.
Over 50% of the power is currently remote-controlled and the lighting levels in the city are around 20-30 lux. Municipal public-lighting actions adhere to the luminosity levels established by the appropriate authorities and organisations. According to international recommendations and the Spanish Lighting Committee (CEI), the necessary lighting levels for security and visibility in a city range between 5 and 30 lux.
Barcelona City Council is working to improve and renovate the city’s lighting installations with the improvements established in the Comprehensive Lighting Renovation Plan2018-2020.