By Deb Lovig

It’s official. EVERYONE is joining the LED Lighting Revolution. At least that’s the way it appeared at the Light+Building show recently in Frankfurt, Germany. It’s too large a show to hit every booth but those I did visit or pass by (it’s a six-day show so you do pass by a lot of booths) were leading with LED lighting products, real or nearly real.

I took some photos of some new (mostly LED) street lights in an outdoor display in the courtyard outside Hall 4.

At the LED City® Council Meeting held during the show Peter Nissen from Stadtwerke Flensburg spoke about his city’s efforts to convert to LED street lighting. He showed some interesting photos of really broken-down street lights. He says many cities in Germany are at a critical point ─ they must replace old, rusted out lights. From his photos I’d say they waited a little too long to invest in new street lights!

German cities Flensburg and Bremen, represented by Holger Janssen of swb, have been evaluating LED street lights and both cities are sold on the technology. Their only concern is higher up-front costs they incur when purchasing LED lights. I am pleased to share that Bremen is the first German and newest LED City.

If you can read German, Peter and Holger’s presentations can be found at:

http://www.ledcity.org/attend_meeting.htm

Finally, just for grins. Take a look at these funky, cocoon-like lights we saw in the OMS L+B booth:

By Deb Lovig

Sometimes others say things so well that it’s best just to point you right on to them. Treehugger.com recently wrote about some research coming from the University of Pittsburgh with regard to energy-efficient street lights. 

You’ll see that they put some hard numbers behind the LED hype that are far in favor of moving to LED for street lighting applications. Hope this helps with decisions you are making in your city.

By Deb Lovig

Most street lights in the U.S. are owned by utilities companies. They provide use of these lights to cities on a sort of leasing system called tariff. The amount a city pays to “lease” the lights is meant to cover the installation, cost of electricity as well as the cost of the light fixture/pole and ongoing and periodic maintenance including replacement when necessary.

In most places, a city may pay a monthly rate per light of $7 to $53 depending on the fixture selected and the cost to service that fixture. Under this lease arrangement, the cost of this off-peak electricity is a small part of the overall monthly rate. Most of the cost goes to pay for the capital investment in the lighting equipment. A few utilities have a flat or average charge per light for all street light fixtures, regardless of the cost of the equipment, the amount of maintenance required or electricity used.

This rate structure has provided investor-owned utilities the necessary vehicle to earn an allowed rate of return, set by the utilities commission in each state, to be profitable and keep investors happy.

So this sexy new LED street lighting comes along and everyone, including the utilities, gets excited about saving a lot of energy, putting a lot less waste into the landfill and saving taxpayers a good chunk of change on maintenance avoidance. However, if LED lighting reduces by 50 percent or more the amount of electricity that will be used and therefore billed by the utility and maintenance costs go down to a bare minimum for the next 10-15 years, just how will the investor-owned utility pay for the higher cost of this new LED equipment, offer an attractive monthly rate to municipalities and make an allowed rate of return?

Progress Energy lineman James LeBlanc installs an LED fixture.

With these key questions looming, most utilities don’t yet offer any sort of lowered rate for LED street lights. And, this has been a major STOP sign for most municipalities that are investigating LED street lighting.

There’s no clear solution at this point but Raleigh’s own Progress Energy Carolina is taking a leadership role in trying to find a good solution or in this case, two good solutions. The North Carolina Utilities Commission and the Public Service Commission of South Carolina just approved a request from Progress Energy Carolinas to offer two new options for reduced rates on LED street lights.

Progress Energy Carolina’s Bob Henderson is quite pleased with this outcome. He tells us that the first option is a bundled all-in-one utility-owned rate where the municipality pays a month fee, like before, which includes purchase of the equipment, electricity used, installation, maintenance and replacement of the LED street light when necessary. The new rate differs from the past in that it is in two parts ─ a fixed basic rate and a variable section. As the prices of the LED fixtures decrease, Progress Energy Carolinas can adjust its pricing accordingly (that’s the variable part) without having to seek commission approval for the rate change.

The second option allows the city to purchase the same approved LED street lights directly from the manufacturer. Cities that qualify can use stimulus funds, grants or low-interest loans to purchase the fixtures and their monthly rate to cover installation, electricity used and maintenance will be roughly half of the cost of the first option. If a fixture replacement is required, the municipality will be responsible for providing another fixture to Progress Energy Carolinas (PEC) to be installed. City-owned fixtures will sport a special label and will be installed on PEC-owned poles. You can see which products are included now in the PEC new rate structure here.

The Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI) folks are providing financial assessment guidance to cities and towns in Progress Energy Carolinas’ service territory using the new LED street light rate structures. Their spreadsheet model can assist municipalities with determining which option is best for them and provide an idea of the payback offered by a switch to LED lighting. The CCI folks have been working steadily along helping the world’s largest cities, like Los Angeles, figure out how to pilot and then purchase and deploy LED street lights. They have put extra effort in assisting the industry with the biggest stumbling block to LED lighting  it costs more money up-front than conventional lights.

If you want to learn more about all this, the Progress Energy Carolinas lighting team is working with the local IES Raleigh chapter to provide a forum (workshop and webinar) April 14. At this event, they plan to share with other utilities and their vendor support personnel the “behind the scenes” details, considerations, experience and passion that went into developing these new rate structures, change-out procedures, specification standards with regard to the roll-out of LED lighting at PEC. Check it out:  http://www.iesraleigh.org/seminarevents.htm

By Deb Lovig

A while back I got an email from Jean Ronel, an entrepreneur and visionary based in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He and a colleague realized that the one thing that would help so many Haitian communities, even those painfully remote mountain villages running on generator-power, is solar-powered path and street lights.

They got some heavy-duty training and mentoring in the U.S. and set off back to Haiti to try to build solar panels and LED street lights, by hand, that could be affordable and useful for any Haitian community. They ordered up parts from the web, messed around with a few different designs and came up with a great solution at an amazing price.

He sent me some photos – they tell an amazing story. Take a look and be prepared to be humbled and astonished and excited.

We talked to him via telephone a few weeks ago and his team at Enersa, the name of his organization, had grown to hundreds of young people now skilled in the art of handcrafting solar panels and LED lights, attaching them to poles and selling them at the amazing affordable price. Read more about their efforts and see photos here.

Business was booming and cities and villages throughout the island were finding ways to purchase one to three lights at a time. Turns out, a single solar-powered LED street light mounted at a key path intersection can do a world of good for safety, flexibility and transportation of people and goods at night. Has any community in the U.S. EVER considered the purchase of one single street light?

We originally wanted the world to know of Jean Ronel and Enersa and we wanted to rally the LED industry around his efforts. We had big ideas of major media coverage, new funds supporting his effort and the villages he is serving. On the morning of Jan. 12, as we stopped to notice that there is a lot more going on in the world than LED lighting…we started to wonder, then worry.

I emailed Jean Ronel in the aftermath of that first terrible earthquake. “Are you and your team okay? Is there any way we can help?”

Jean Ronel responded, “I was very lucky. I’m OK, my family also is OK. All the ENERSA employees are OK, only the plant was destroyed. We are thinking about how we can restart. Right now it is very difficult, since Gvt does not exist. Every Gvt buildings are destroyed. Thanks you for your help, we will let you know very soon.”

If even one of Enersa’s LED street lights is operational at this time, his vision is true. To reach Jean Ronel and Enersa directly, email  Enersahaiti (at) gmail (dot)com.

By Deb Lovig

We can make LEDs in almost any color. They certainly can be mixed to produce any color of light, and for the longest time most people associated LED lighting with colored or color-changing light.

One of the first signs that an LED light fixture is not operating well is a change in the color of the LEDs and therefore the color of the light. We long ago created handmade LED lights for a tradeshow, and they worked quite nicely for the show. Since they worked so well, when we got them back to the ranch, we reasoned we could make them even brighter by running more current into them. If you don’t already know it, LED geeks always go for “brighter.” We somehow decided that we should run them harder – jack up the forward current, get more light and be so happy.

Within a few days the LEDs in these lights turned a rather unattractive purple and got really dim. We were burning them up, and they were having none of it. Note to you from the LED geeks: We can start with the best LEDs in the world, but if we mess up the fixture system, we’ll end up with bad LED lighting.

Years later we are out stumping for good system design, which means good thermal management, low forward voltage, creative use of secondary optics and careful LED placement for maximum output.  Good design decisions will help make sure LED lighting fixtures put out the best and most light, last a really long time and save lots of energy.