By: Sean Harris, vertical marketing manager, lighting at Cree, Inc.
The growing demands of a rapidly expanding urban population are accelerating the move toward cleaner and more efficient energy solutions. According to Navigant Research, it is expected that the world’s population will expand by 2.4 billion people during the next 35 years, translating to greater demands on the energy industry. With street lighting accounting for up to 40 percent of a city’s electricity bill, municipalities are urgently seeking an efficient, budget-friendly solution for their streets and roadways. Advancements in energy-efficient LED lighting offer municipalities cost-effective and long-term solutions that improve light quality, offer easy installation, and deliver nearly maintenance-free lighting. Cree, a leading innovator in LED technology, is on a mission to achieve 100 percent adoption of LED lighting. For municipalities, this means providing better light experiences while driving bottom-line savings that free up funds for other city projects.
With LED lighting, cities can improve the quality of their illumination and maximize their bottom line by reducing the amount of energy and money spent on maintaining street lighting systems, helping them better manage their stretched financial resources. Since LED lighting delivers beautiful warm or cool light with high color rendering index (CRI) and consistent color, upgrading existing lighting with LEDs leads to significant and noticeable improvements in the visual experience for pedestrians and drivers alike, contributing to safer roads and lower crime rates.
Additionally, long-lasting LED lighting delivers a low cost of ownership with significant savings over traditional light sources, such as high-pressure sodium (HPS) and metal halide, reducing energy consumption in municipal applications by up to 80 percent when coupled with smart controls. The cheapest, cleanest energy is the energy not used, so implementing energy-efficient LED lighting is one of the most valuable long-term changes a city can make, and city boards are starting to notice.
Beginning in 2009, the City of Los Angeles, which has the second-largest street lighting system in the nation, updated more than 155,000 of its HPS street lights to LED lighting, including Cree® LEDway® and XSP luminaries. The results were realized almost immediately, with energy consumption decreasing by up to 63 percent. Long term, the City is expected to see energy and maintenance savings of $10 million. The Los Angeles Police Department has reported a decline in night-time crime, in part because of the improved light quality in neighborhoods from LEDs.
Cree is also focusing on improving the lighting experiences in rural areas. Cree’s newest outdoor lighting innovation, the LED Rural Utility Light (RUL) Series, is designed to address the estimated 10 to 13 million rural street and area light fixtures installed in North America. The RUL Series outperforms incumbent HPS and mercury-vapor (MV) technology to provide quick payback and reduced cost of ownership, delivering a better, more affordable lighting experience for residential roadways, walkways, storage and loading areas. The fixture is also lightweight, making it easy to ship and install.
Thanks to Cree, LED lighting has quickly transitioned into a practical reality due to innovations that enable better light quality, no-hassle maintenance and impressive paybacks. It is incumbent upon municipalities to make the switch to LED lighting sooner rather than later in order to meet their long-term sustainability goals and maximize potential lifetime savings.
Cree® and LEDway® are registered trademarks of Cree, Inc.