Green Options » streetlights

Lighting Science Corporation Blazes a New Trail for LED Streetlights

Tina Casey — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:51:15 +0000

Lighting Science Corporation has just announced a new breakthrough in high efficiency LED (light emitting diode) technology that outperforms existing LED streetlights, providing an even greater incentive for the nation’s roadways and institutions to make the switch from standard streetlights to more sustainable LED lighting.

The new LEDs, dubbed the PROLIFIC Series Roadway Luminaires, offer substantial savings over conventional HID (high intensity discharge) streetlighting. Lighting Science also claims that PROLIFIC performs up to nearly 90 lumens per watt, giving it a big advantage over current LED technology, which performs at up to 60 lumens per watt. To sweeten the payback even more, federal stimulus funds are available for cities to make the switch from conventional lighting to LED.

Los Angeles Getting 140,000 New LED Streetlights

Jerry James Stone — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 16:38:12 +0000

The city of Los Angeles intends to retrofit 140,000 streetlights with LED light bulbs. If successful, this will be the nation’s largest lighting retrofit, and it comes with a price tag of about $57 million.

With nearly 35 million streetlights in the United States, it’s estimated that they use 1% of all the electricity is consumed nationwide.

The initiative was announced in Los Angeles by former President Bill Clinton and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. That’s because LA is getting help with the retrofit from the Clinton Climate Initiative’s Outdoor Lighting Program. Part of the funding also comes from a $14 million rebate from the Department of Water and Power. The Clinton Climate Initiative has become an increasingly active arm of the Clinton Global Initiative.

>>More RGB News On Greening LA: Los Angeles Giving Out FREE CFLs

“If you have ever been to Death Valley National Park and looked up on a clear night, you would see that the stars seem to be dimmer than they were when I was a child. But they are not getting dimmer, really–the rest of the sky is getting brighter because of all the lights from Los Angeles and Las Vegas and other surrounding cities and communities,” President Clinton said.

“This is the best place in the world — in the U.S. at least — to lead this,” Clinton went on to say, citing the city’s ongoing environmental efforts. “This is like taking 6,000 cars off the road. “If every major city followed your lead, we could eliminate 2 1/2 coal-fired power plants.”

Once the overhaul is complete, the city will get an energy savings of about 40-percent and reduce carbon emissions by 40 tons/year. It is expected this will save the city $48 million, and reduce carbon emissions by 197,000 tons, over a seven year period.

The program is scheduled to start in June. Initially 20,000 bulbs will be replaced, and 30,000 with each following year.

While the program will start before New York City’s own efforts to provide LED streetlights, but NYC hopes to replace up to 300,000 streetlights with LEDs. Oh snap!

German Towns Test Pay-to-Use Energy-Saving Streetlights

Alex Felsinger — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 03:31:06 +0000

In order to save on electricity costs, three German towns have begun testing a program that requires residents to call ahead to request street lighting be turned on late at night.

Residents in Lemgo, Schwelentrup-Doerntrup, and Rahden pay up to 10 cents a minute for lighting after 11 pm under the plan, called Dial4Light. People use cell or landlines to call the city, give their route and time period when light is needed, and then a computer system triggers the lights to turn on along the path.

The plan is a creative effort to save energy, but could result in a whole different set of problems.