Global Trial Shows LED Street Lighting Delivers Up To 85% Energy Savings

Results from a global trial of light-emitting diode (LED) street lights confirm that the fixtures can deliver electricity savings of up to 85% over incumbent technologies. The two-and-a-half-year pilot, called LightSavers, tested 533 LED lamps in 15 trials in 12 cities, including New York, London, Hong Kong, Toronto, and Sydney.Findings from the trials are presented in a report co-released by The Climate Group, electronics giant Philips, and HSBC earlier this month on the sidelines of the Rio+20 summit. The Climate Group launched LightSavers in 2009, supported by the HSBC Climate Partnership, with the goal to accelerate the market adoption of outdoor LED lighting and smart-lighting controls.
"We conclude that LEDs are ready to be brought to scale in outdoor applications. The independent and verifi-able results from the LightSavers trials and accompanying public surveys give compelling evidence that many commercially-available, outdoor LED products offer high quality light, durability, and significant electricity savings in the range of 50 to 70%," wrote Climate Group CEO Mark Kenber in the report's foreword.He added: "High capital cost and a dearth of effective financing approaches continue to be barriers to market maturity. But these will diminish as investment flows into companies making quality products; as LED and smart control device prices continue to fall; and as innovations spread in project financing and procurement in cities like Birmingham, Guangzhou and Los Angeles."
In California, to cite another example, support for LED street lights project financing has come from the California Energy Commission (CEC) and the U.S. Department of Energy.Cree and SemiLEDs End Patent Litigation.In January, I reported at this blog that 10 California cities, several of them quite small, had used funding provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to undertake LED street lighting retrofit projects. Since I published that post, the CEC has announced that about a dozen more California cities have launched LED street lighting retrofit projects courtesy of the same ARRA-funded Energy Efficiency Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) program.So confident are the report partners in the potential of LED lighting they want LEDs to become the global lighting standard. "All new public lighting – both street lighting and in public buildings – should be LED by 2015, with the aim of all public lighting being LED by 2020," said the Climate Group's Kenber in a statement.The authors conclude: "LED outdoor luminaires have reached maturity in terms of their performance. City lighting managers from across the world have independently verified that LEDs can live up to their promise of exceptional perfor-mance, energy efficiency, and public approval, with indicators pointing towards stabilization in light output in many products after an initial period of volatility."