City Workers Turn to LED's for Lighting the Streets

The city of Ann Arbor, Michigan stands to save around $100,000 a year by replacing all of their downtown street lights with more cost effective LED's. The LED's consume less than half of the energy of standard light bulbs.

CNN reports that City Workers in Ann Arbor, Michigan are now turning to light-emitting diodes, or LED's to replace around 1,400 of the cities street lights. Approximately thirty miles west of Detroit, the eco-friendly city will be the first to use LED lighting for all Downtown street lights. The LED's use less than half of the energy of traditional light bulbs which could mean a whopping savings of $100,000 a year for the community. "LEDs pay for themselves in four years," said Mayor John Hieftje, who announced their plans this week as they join Raleigh, North Carolina, and Toronto in the LED City initiative, an industry-government group working to evaluate, deploy and promote LED lighting. "They provide the same light, but they last 10 years. We had to replace the old ones every two years." According to the U.S. Department of Energy, lighting consumes 22 percent of the electricity produced in the United States and using LED's could cut consumption in half. Director of corporate marketing, Greg Merritt at Durham, North Carolina-based Cree Inc., which is making the components inside Ann Arbor's new lights, acknowledged that LEDs can be expensive. But "as we improve the technology, the economics make sense for more and more applications," he said.