A new approach to calculating energy performance indicators of road lighting

One of the aims of the modernization of the existing road lighting installations is to improve their energy efficiency. EN 13,201-5 standard introduces energy performance indicators for road lighting installations which only take into account active power. Real installations of road lighting do not only experience active power flow, but also reactive power and distortion power flows. This is due to the non-linear current-voltage characteristics of luminaires. Moreover, the use of LED technology has changed the power factor of a luminaire from inductive to capacitive. The paper proposes the introduction of new energy performance indicators: the reactive power density indicator DQ, the annual reactive energy consumption indicator DEQ, the distortion power density indicator DH and the annual distortion energy consumption indicator DEH. The energy performance indicator DP and the new DQ and DH indicators can be presented as coordinates in the Cartesian space in the form of a vector which is interpreted as an indicator of the total energy performance. The use of the proposed indicators in the road lighting design will enable the selection of the best lighting design variant in terms of the electrical power quality, especially if the compared luminaires have a similar or identical active power.