Next month marks the four-year anniversary of the world\u2019s most ambitious LED street light conversion project. On February 16, 2009, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and President Bill Clinton announced [PDF] a partnership under which the city, advised by the Clinton Climate Initiative, would outfit 140,000 street lights with light-emitting diode (LED) fixtures.<\/p>\n
Project planners faced daunting logistics. The City of Los Angeles owns and operates the nation\u2019s second-largest street lighting system: 210,000 street lights (including 70,000 decorative street lamps that will be retrofitted in a second phase) anchored along 4,500 miles of illuminated streets.<\/p>\n
The Los Angeles project is of a piece with a larger shift to LED street lighting. I reported at this blog last June, for instance, on results from a global trial of LED street lighting in a dozen cities. The City of Portland (OR) launches an LED retrofit project next month. I could wallpaper my office with press releases from the California Energy Commission announcing LED street light conversions completed in cities across the state over the past 16 months \u2013 many funded, as I\u2019ve written about here, under the federal stimulus. A recent Pike Research report found that shipments of LED street lights will increase from fewer than 3 million last year to more than 17 million in 2020.<\/p>\n