LED Cities
July 31st, 2008 by john
Anchorage, Alaska is joining the growing list of towns switching some of their street lighting to energy efficient LED lamps by joining the LED City program. The city will be converting about a quarter of its street lights to LED lamps at a cost of $2.2M. The savings from this investment could be as much as $360,000 per year.
The LED City program was started by Cree, a US-based manufacturer of LED components in 2007. They have a number of cities around the world already signed up for the program, including Raleigh, NC; Ann Arbor, MI, Austin, TX; Toronto, Ontario; Tianjin, China, and Torraca, Italy.
Tags: anchorage, ann arbor, austin, canada, china, cree, italy, led, raleigh, streetlamp
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August 2nd, 2008 at 8:55 pm
While investigating LED lighting last year I was surprised to find out that Oakland had actually done its own LED street lighting study. Unfortunately they concluded that while LED lighting was far superior from a quality of light perspective, the savings were too long term to be viable in retrofitting current lights. The study http://www.fypower.org/news/?p=2314 estimated 20-25 year payback time for retrofit, or 10-11 years for new lights. After reading the study I realized they had forgotten to account for increasing costs in electricity. I contacted the people who did the study pointing out the error and they came back with the pretty lame “well we wanted to keep as many things constant in the comparison”. Strangely they accounted for future costs of just about every factor and since the savings are largely based on electricity saved and reduced maintenance it was weird to keep electricity costs constant…