Street Lighting Electricity Consumption Cut By 61% With LEDs & Wireless Controls

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West_Richland_LEDsThe city of West Richland, Washington, just completed an LED upgrade to its entire street lighting system, and the project is expected to reduce the system’s electric consumption by 61% and save the municipality $67,000 per year in energy costs.

The city street lighting project, which included replacing more than 1000 high pressure sodium (HPS) lights with energy-efficient LED models, as well as installing a wireless monitoring and control system, will allow the city to move from a flat rate from the utility to a consumption-based tariff, which will further reduce the city’s cost for street lighting.

“It makes good economic and business sense for the City to install new LED street lights and a wireless control system that reduces energy use by more than 60 percent while improving illumination, safety and addressing dark sky considerations. In addition to dramatic energy and maintenance savings, the control system will also enable us to move to a lower cost metered rate schedule that provides further cost reductions.” – Brent Gerry, Mayor, City of West Richland

The project was installed through a partnership with Ameresco, as well as the city’s electric utility, Benton Rural Electric Authority (REA), and thanks to partial funding from energy efficiency grants and incentives from the utility, is essentially “budget-neutral” to the city.

According to Ameresco, West Richland is “One of the first cities in U.S. to use control-based energy metering to achieve a lower cost rate tariff,” and that move is expected to reduce the city’s average cost per kWh by about 26%. The new wireless control and monitoring system is said to allow the city to “implement dimming strategies” that could reduce street lighting energy consumption by another 10-20%.

Image via Business Wire


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Derek Markham

Derek lives in southwestern New Mexico and digs bicycles, simple living, fungi, organic gardening, sustainable lifestyle design, bouldering, and permaculture. He loves fresh roasted chiles, peanut butter on everything, and buckets of coffee.

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