Michael Kanellos 11 24 09, 12:29 PM

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Boston Joins Anchorage, Toronto, Etc. With LED Streetlights

Boston has joined Cree's LED City Program and put LED streetlights in Boston Common.

LEDs use less than half of the power of conventional streetlights, but more importantly they rarely need to be replaced. In a more extensive trial, Anchorage, Alaska replaced 16,000 light fixtures, about one-fourth of the streetlights in town, with LEDs. The swap should save the city about $360,000 a year in electricity, judging by current prices. The city will likely also save a similar amount of money in lower maintenance costs. LEDs last longer than traditional sodium lights so fewer maintenance crews are required. Toronto, Austin, Ann Arbor and Raleigh, North Carolina have already launched municipal LED lighting projects with Cree. Maintenance is one of the big reasons that LEDs will take off in commercial and municipal settings first. Starbucks is putting them in.

LEDs can also be easily networked. In Quebec, technicians have rigged smart streetlights up with sensors to allow police to detect when accidents occur. Oslo has paired networked streetlights with applications for pedestrian safety.

San Francisco has put up networked LED streetlights on one block in the Tenderloin, an area frequented by drug dealers. Weirdly, it was pushed as an idea to save energy. It's not a neighborhood where you would ever want to dim the streetlights, even in the daytime.