City Lights Efficiency
Los Angeles has a lot of lighting. Is it efficient?
BSL-operated Street Lights
Efficient
In 2009, the city's Bureau of Street Lighting
began replacing 140,000 standard streetlights with
LEDs, finishing four years later. As of 2015, the
city says it achieved the following reductions:
- total wattage decreased from 38MW to 14MW
- energy use decreased by 100 GWh/year (a 63% reduction)
- energy cost decreased by $750,000/year
- CO2 emissions decreased by 58 million tons/year
The improvements come partly because the LEDs are more efficient,
but also in large part because the new fixtures have precision optics
that aim light exactly where it is needed.
Not yet efficient
Another 80,000 BSL-operated street lights have not yet been
upgraded to LEDs. These are tricky to upgrade because custom kits
may be required for historic street light types, but other cities have
had success with this; see e.g. City
of Redlands
LADWP-operated Utilitarian Street Lights
The LADWP maintains about 30,000 "utilitarian" street lights
on wooden power poles. The ones I have seen are mostly cobra style
HPS lamps and boxy ones which give a bluer light; I haven't seen any
LED-based ones yet, though the LADWP says they do sometimes replace
broken ones with LEDs (but supposedly "not in alleys", for some reason).
See Also