Saginaw, MI, and India are going all-in with LEDs.
In Saginaw, the City Council has approved replacement of all of the city’s 6,000 streetlights with LEDs. The project is budgeted at more than $1.8 million, according to MLive.
The contract for the LEDs was awarded to Standard Electric and the installation contract to Helm Electric, which was the low bidder. Last month, the council adopted a plan to sell as much as $6 million in bonds to finance the lighting and other capital improvements.
The LEDs use 68 percent less electricity to produce the same illumination as the high pressure sodium lights they will replace. That will reduce the annual electric bill from about $650,000 to about $440,000. The city also plans to upgrade the Saginaw’s energy management system.
The light change out will begin in November and be completed in March or April 2016.
On the other side of both the world and project scale, the government of India said late last month that it will replace all its street lights with LEDs during the next two years.
The announcement had no numbers on the size of the project. However, Clean Technica pegs that number – based on government information – at 35 million and says that energy demand is 3,400 MW. This would be reduced to 1,400 MW with LEDs. The initial plan for home and streetlight conversion was announced in January. At that time, India said that 100 cities were to be converted by March 2016 and the rest of the country two years later.
