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Since its establishment, Mt Stromlo has had policies around both the environment and lighting to allow us to do our work and keep the skies as relatively dark as possible. While the necessity of this may have stopped or been reduced with the 2003 fires, in the past 5 years, Omexom, which manages and operates the lighting infrastructure in Canberra, as well as the ACT Government, have been aiming to reduce light spill and the carbon footprint of the city. The ACT lighting network has been slowly upgraded to both better and more efficient lights (LEDs) as well as power poles that can be individually controlled and have a custom power/wattage output. In a first of its kind experiment, for the past few months, we have been trialing reducing the overall lighting of Canberra at various levels, and measuring the impacts on sky glow, sky brightness, as well as the energy and subsequent CO2 emission savings - which add up to Gigawatts worth of energy. We will present the system, experiment, and results from this as well as where to next - both in Canberra and as a model for other cities across the world. Talks from Brad Tucker (RSAA), Pete Swanton (RSAA), Danny Bettay (Cybernetics / Omexom), Michael Rosetta (Omexom), David Hua (ACT Government) |
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