Los Angeles, CA
| Number of Lights Committed | Electricity Savings kWh/yr) | Value of Electricity Saved ($/yr) | Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reductions (metric tonnes/yr) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 110,000 | 38,335,000 | $4,101,845 | 26,950 |
Program Description
The City of Los Angeles (LA) owns and operates one of the largest street lighting systems in the nation. The City’s Bureau of Street Lighting is responsible for the design, construction, operation, maintenance and repair of the street lighting system within the city limits. There are currently more than 210,000 lights in LA, consisting of more than 400 designs.
Service Area
The City of Los Angeles.
Situation Highlights
Los Angeles continues its widespread street lighting conversion which started in 2009 and by 2016 was testing decorative fixtures and evaluating smart city solutions products to include remote monitoring systems, solar-to-grid connections, security cameras, EV charging stations, and mobile apps to report outages. In phase one, more than 170,000 cobra head street light conversions were completed and phase two will include over 30,000 post-top, decorative style luminaires. Los Angeles self-financed the upgrades using their existing budget, paying for the system out of the savings they achieved.
Many of the post-top street lights were originally lighted by incandescent sources in the early 20th century, with a very warm (~2800 K) correlated color temperature (CCT). In order to preserve the original look, these neighborhoods prefer a similar CCT of LED. When LA’s LED conversion program began, such warmer CCTs carried significant cost and energy use tradeoffs, and thus these applications were delayed until a later second phase effort. As the costs of LED products have in fact decreased while their performance has steadily increased over this time period, LA is now able to install such warm CCT post-top products in these neighborhoods at competitive pricing and performance. For a consistent appearance, remaining cobra head fixtures on the feeder roads in these neighborhoods will be installed with warm CCT products to match the post-tops.
LA installed a controls system on the first 50,000 street lights with the primary purpose of monitoring their operation. This was done because LED street lights were still very new and the city didn’t know what to expect in terms of reliability and wanted to monitor their operation in real time. It turns out the reliability was so high on the first 50,000 units that the city decided the controls system wasn’t worth the additional expense beyond that point.