Four years ago Los Angeles decided to change its street lighting to LEDs and the results have come in and the savings are phenomenal. They have converted a little over half of all their street lights and are already saving $5,325,793 annually in lighting costs. It’s worth noting that LEDs use 80% less electricity than traditional lighting solutions while also providing better lighting for users of the street.
Hopefully the success that LA has seen will encourage other cities to make the switch to cheaper and more efficient lighting.
Maintenance savings are real, too: In 2008, pre-LED roll-out, Los Angeles logged 70,000 street light repair and maintenance events; in FY 2012, maintenance and repair events fell to 46,300. LEDs are longer lived than the incumbent units they replace (10-15 years versus 4-6 years), which means that maintenance should steadily decline as LED units are fully deployed. A remote monitoring system, installed with the LED fixtures, indentifies problems in real time.
LED fixtures also fail at a lesser rate than incumbent technologies. After 36 months of initial operation, for instance, high-intensity discharge (HID) fixtures in Los Angeles recorded an average failure rate of 10%; the average failure rate for LED fixtures, according to the latest figures, is 0.2% (189 of 98,000 installed). At full LED deployment, Los Angeles expects to save $2.5 million annually on maintenance costs.
