Cities can significantly lower operating expenses and meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions by implementing retrofit projects that enhance the quality of street lighting service. Such projects can be planned today, even with an evolving product market and a constrained project budget.

When planned and deployed intelligently, street lighting retrofit projects can provide an attractive return on investment – simple payback is commonly achieved in seven to 10 years. In some cases, such a project can be cash-flow positive starting in the first year. Large, coordinated retrofit projects are far more economical than small-scale, piecemeal projects.

Example Projects:

To demonstrate the efficacy of these projects, consider two examples of cities that have moved forward with large-scale retrofit projects in the past 18 months:

•  Anchorage, Alaska, following a March 2008 pilot test comparing LED and induction fixtures with existing high-pressure sodium vapor fixtures, moved forward in September 2008 with a retrofit of 4,400 150W and 250W high-pressure sodium fixtures on residential streets to 82W and 111W LED fixtures, respectively. The project will achieve simple payback in 6.5 years; the energy savings is 45-58 percent.

Enabling its retrofit project, the City of Anchorage rewrote its municipal lighting ordinance to account for a new luminaire classification system; backlight, uplight, glare (BUG) ratings, per IESNA TM-15-07; and integrated a lumen effectiveness multiplier (LEM) table to guide designers in the use of broad spectrum light sources. In the pilot test, Anchorage residents vastly preferred the broad spectrum LED and induction light to the narrow-spectrum high pressure sodium light.

•  Los Angeles, California, after testing both LED and induction fixtures to replace high-pressure sodium fixtures, began a retrofit of 140,000 residential streetlights to LED technology to take place over the next five years. The project will additionally equip every new fixture with a remote monitoring system, enabling two-way communication with fixtures to optimize maintenance delivery and verify energy savings. The project will, upon full implementation, reduce 68,640,000 kWh per year of electricity demand and avoid 40,500 tons of CO2e emissions.

The project financing is through a rebate provided by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and a seven-year $40 million loan at an interest rate of 5.25 percent; it will be repaid through energy and maintenance savings.

Read the Full Street Lighting Retrofit Report made available through the Clinton Foundation.

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