Michael Kanellos

Anchorage to Join LED Cities Club July 29, 2008 at 2:38 PM

This will be a good test to see if the light coming from light emitting diodes is warm enough.

Anchorage, Alaska in conjunction with LED maker Cree will replace the 16,000 light fixtures, about one-fourth of the streetlights in town, with LEDs. The swap should save the city about $360,000 a year in electricity, judging by current prices. The city will likely save a similar amount of money in lower maintenance costs. LEDs last longer than traditional sodium lights so fewer maintenance crews are required.

The city could also provide an interesting place to test the quality of light. LEDs have historically been bogged down by two issues: their comparatively high cost compared to traditional light bulbs and the sterile, antiseptic quality of the light coming from the bulb. Manufacturers have tinkered with phosphors and combining different colored LEDs into the same lamp, but people still tend to prefer the warm light that comes from incandescent bulbs. (Incandescents produce light out of the orange and red spectrum.)

In Anchorage, the lights will be on for a long time. For 85 days a year, the sun shines for less than eight hours a day, providing plenty of opportunity for feedback. (As an added bonus, the lights are smaller, making it tougher to shoot them out. Just in case anyone is suffering from SAD.)

Toronto, Austin, Ann Arbor and Raleigh, North Carolina have already launched municipal LED lighting projects with Cree.

LEDs and solid state lighting are expected to begin to take a larger share of the lighting market in the next few years. The lumens per watt for LEDs has been climbing while the price has been coming down. Commercial buildings and public spaces will likely convert to LEDs much more rapidly than homes. LEDs, which are chips, also don’t contain mercury like florescent bulbs.

Lighting, by the way, accounts for 22 percent of the electricity consumed in the U.S.

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