First City to Change All Its Streetlights to LED

Which city will be first in North America to completely convert its entire street-lighting network to LEDs?

Would you guess… Welland, Ontario?

Its City Council just voted unanimously in favor of completely replacing the inefficient and outdated city street lights with LED fixtures over the next 12 months. The city Council also approved financing the $2.7 million retrofit through debenture.They believe they will be First city in North America to change all of its streetlights to LED.

While Cities across North America such as Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto and many others are currently are testing a wide array of solid-state lighting, or running small trial projects, Welland Ontario has been carrying out its own tests since 2007.

The first phase of this project will replace 4300 high-pressure sodium (HPS) fixtures with super efficient LED fixtures.

661 units of 100W HPS replaced with 30W LED fixtures

1574 units of 135W HPS replaced with 30W LED fixtures

1063 units of 190W HPS replaced with 50W LED fixtures

983 units of 285W HPS replaced with 77W LED fixtures

19 units of 485W HPS replaced with 120W LED fixtures

“The LED retrofit program is expected to reduce street-lighting energy costs by $221,553 and street-lighting maintenance costs by $159,250”

After paying the various charges including debt repayments, the city will save a net amount of $2.38 million over the 15-year term of the agreement.

In addition the city will reduce its annual carbon Emissions from Approximately 2,000,000 Kg To Just Over 500,000 Kg Of CO2.

LED technology will be supplied by Appalachian Lighting Systems, Inc. (ALSI) is an American based commercial LED lighting products company. With its ALLED® brand of Solid-state lighting (SSL) fixtures including Appalachians ALLink™ control management system, which uses RF wireless as well as GPRS/GSM technology to enable programming as well as remote fault monitoring. Using web-based monitoring that enables control over the entire grid via a handheld device. Additionally, on-site maintenance crews and staff can monitor operational activity and directly control and analyze the system from the convenience of their workstation or hand held device. This is a fully secure system, using 128 byte encryption that is NIST approved.

Substantially reduces city’s mercury consumption

Taking into account that high-pressure sodium lamp’s on average contain between “11 and 22 mg of mercury”(EEB Conference, Mercury-containing lamps under the spotlight”, 27th June 2008, Brussels, Belgium) and the fact these bulbs must be replaced on a yearly basis, means every year 47 – 100 g of mercury would have been used and discarded. Products containing mercury must be properly disposed of to make sure contamination of North American wetlands is kept to a minimum. LEDs contain no mercury or other toxic substances.

Blueprint for other cities

As cities large and small struggle to balance shrinking budgets, Welland, Ontario’s solid-state streetlight program may lead the way and help convince other city councils across Canada or even North America that the benefits of installing LED street lighting far outweigh any cost concerns.