Los Angeles will replace its 140,000 streetlight fixtures with LED units over the next five years. L.A. will receive help from the Clinton Climate initiative for taking part in the most extensive municipal green lighting retrofit on record. Former President Bill Clinton announced the project this week in Los Angeles.

The city’s Bureau of Street Lighting will work with the Clinton Climate Initiative’s Outdoor Lighting Program to complete to project. The upgraded lighting system will save the city a projected $48 million in energy and maintenance costs, while cutting carbon emissions by more than 197,000 tons over a seven year period. The money saved during that period will pay back the loan required to fund the project. After the loan is paid back, the city expects to save nearly $10 million a year in costs, reduce electricity consumption for lighting by at least 40%, and cut carbon emissions by 40,500 tons. The effect is similar to taking 6,700 passenger vehicles off the road annually.

Monitoring units will be installed in each of the new streetlights to enable immediate reporting of service failures. The broader Los Angeles green lighting and energy efficiency program includes a giveaway of two compact fluorescent light bulbs to each of the 1.2 million households in the city. The free light bulb giveaway will save 240 GWh of energy and prevent the release of 131,000 metric tons of CO2 each year, equivalent to taking 24,000 cars of the roads. The light bulb project is expected to save each household $68 in energy costs over the life of the bulbs and $61.3 million in fuel costs for generating electricity.
 

Source: GreenBiz.com -- Consulting-Specifying Engineer