While typical streetlight lamps will last from four to six years, LED fixtures have a longer life span, estimated from 10 to 12 years. The new, white-light LED streetlight units are more durable and damage-resistant than other technologies. This will reduce the frequency and cost to repair streetlight fixtures and will provide city with considerable savings in labor and material. The improved equipment life also means that fixtures will more reliably light streets and sidewalks for city residents. Los Angeles is committed to using LED fixtures that will ease what is known as sky glow – the artificial illumination of the night sky.

If you have ever been to Death Valley National Park and looked up on a clear night, you would see that the stars seem to be dimmer than they were when I was a child. But they are not getting dimmer, really – the rest of the sky is getting brighter because of all the lights from Los Angeles and Las Vegas and other surrounding cities and communities, former president Clinton said. Now, thanks to the work of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting, and my Foundation’s Climate Initiative, the stars over Death Valley may again shine more brightly.

Once this overhaul is fully complete, city will save electricity expended on street lighting in the city by a minimum of 40% and reduce carbon emissions by approximately 40,500 tons a year, which is the equivalent of taking 6,700 passenger vehicles off the road every year. Over a seven-year period, the city will save a total of $48 million and reduce carbon emissions by 197,000 tons. After the loan is repaid in seven years, L.A. will continue to save $10 million annually as a direct result of this lighting retrofit project. In addition, this loan will have no adverse impact on the city, as the loan payments will be covered in full by savings from current energy and maintenance costs.

This LED retrofit project also will include the installation of remote monitoring units at all 140,000 streetlights replaced in the city. These devices automatically will report streetlight failures directly to the Bureau of Street Lighting for immediate repair, thus enabling its staff to optimize its maintenance services. Now better than ever before, field crews will know why and when a streetlight malfunctions, and how to fix it swiftly.

Benefits for every city:

Street lighting costs represent one of the largest components of a city government’s utility bill, often accounting for 10% to 38% of the total bill. With nearly 35 million streetlights in US, about 1% of all electricity is used by street lighting systems.

If every city followed the example of Los Angeles and reduced the electricity used by their streetlights by 50%, it would be equivalent to eliminating over 2.5 of those coal plants per year, former president Clinton said. We would do that while saving taxpayers money. And by doing that, we would also reclaim our night sky.

CCI’s Outdoor Lighting Program works with C40 partner cities to improve the energy efficiency of street and traffic light systems through a combination of technical, purchasing, and project assistance. City’s Bureau of Street Lighting coordinated with CCI to evaluate and quantify the city’s anticipated savings and environmental impact from a citywide deployment of LED streetlight units. CCI provided valuable analysis and external perspective on investment and finance possibilities associated with the energy savings that result from LED technology. CCI’s modeling and technology analysis as well as its financial advisory served as key reference sources for the development of this comprehensive retrofit plan.

To date, white-light LEDs were not technologically advanced enough to provide significant energy savings when used for roadway fixtures. These systems now, though, are able to upend the standard for cost-effective outdoor lighting, particularly when used in combination with new streetlight control and monitoring systems. Currently, CCI is building upon its efforts with city. and working with other cities on large-scale street lighting retrofit projects.