The overall project involves the replacement of the 250,000 light points in 302 metro stations and 66 RER stations with LED lighting.
A hundred metro and RER stations will be fitted out each year between 2013 and 2017. Roll-out will commence in mid-April 2013 at Franklin D. Roosevelt metro station (lines 1 and 9). This project is fully funded by RATP.
The tender was divided into six lots, of which five were awarded to a partnership between Philips and French professional lighting company Solutions Techniques d’Eclairage Professionnel (Step). The sixth lot went to Soitec, a French company best known for its work on semiconductor materials.
The switch to LED fixtures will reduce the energy needed to light up the Paris metro and suburban RER stations by more than 50%, while improving the light quality at the same time, said Philips.
"Philips is proud to work with RATP to help achieve the world's first transport network whose stations will be fully fitted with LED lighting," said Benjamin Azoulay, general manager of Philips Lighting France.
RATP says that it aims to reduce its energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions by 15% from 2004 until 2020. Obviously, the switch to LED lighting is intended to help meet those objectives. The electricity usage of RATP's stations represents roughly 12% of its total energy consumption.
Since August 2009, RATP has conducted numerous trials with LED lighting, including, for example, the replacement of all the lights in Censier-Daubenton metro station (early 2010), at RATP head office (2010) and certain industrial facilities (2011).
On the strength of the results, the group made the decision to roll out LED lighting across its metro and RER networks, representing a surface area of around one million square meters.
With 12 million passengers travelling in and around Paris every day, RATP is the world's 5th largest urban transport operator. Its multimodal network, one of the biggest in the world, includes 14 metro lines, two RER lines, three tram lines, 350 bus routes and direct links to two of the city's airports.
