Three students from Cork have claimed the number one spot at the International Environment and Sustainability Project Olympiad (INESPO) in Amsterdam.

Ellen Fitzgerald, Aoife Dolan and Niamh Nyhan from Sacred Heart Secondary School in Clonakilty saw off competition from 47 other countries.

Their project focused on energy efficiency and energy usage in street lighting.

They discovered that there are an estimated 400,000 street lights in Ireland, and the cost of street lighting throughout the country is on average €40m a year.

They set out to design an LED bulb that could be screwed directly into the standard street lamp fitting, on the basis that LED bulbs are much more energy efficient than the bulbs currently used in street lamps.

The LED bulb also has a much longer life expectancy, thus cutting replacement costs.

Sheila Porter, SciFest CEO, said: "The students really developed their project since their win at SciFest 2014 and it shows that when students engage with STEM outside the classroom, they bring their learning to a new level and produce amazing results."