LED Traffic Lights to Save City $104,000

By Jared Paben, The Bellingham Herald, Wash.

Jan. 4–The city of Bellingham has finished installing new LED bulbs into its traffic signal lights, but did drivers notice?

Probably not. From a distance the lights look the same, and they’re just as bright.

But the city will see a difference.

The city’s Department of Public Works estimates that replacing the old 175-watt incandescent bulbs with lightweight LED units will save the city about $104,000 a year in electricity costs. LEDs, short for light-emitting diodes, use only 6.5 watts per traffic light.

“That’s just a total, straight energy savings right there,” said Clark Williams, superintendent of facilities.

The move will save money being collected from the city’s gasoline and real estate excise taxes, Williams said. That money will go into a reserve fund that could be dipped into for future road projects.

And while maintenance crews used to have to replace old lights and scrub the glass lenses every two years, the new units are guaranteed for a minimum of five years and require no cleaning. After about three years, they will have paid for themselves in saved electricity costs, Williams said.

The city spent about $311,000 on 1,605 lights, including pedestrian “walk” and “don’t walk” lights, for 105 city intersections, Williams said. That’s after a $40,000 discount from Puget Sound Energy as part of an energy-saving program, Williams said.

For the past five years, the city has used the LED lights when installing new lights for intersections, but only early in 2005 did it begin to retrofit existing lights, swapping them in during regular maintenance, he said.

Like many cities that have switched to the new bulbs, including Bellevue, the city decided against replacing the yellow lights. Because the lights only activate for a few seconds out of each rotation, the city didn’t expect to get enough of an electricity cost savings to make the investment worth it, Williams said.

Officials hope the new lights cut into the $45,000 a month the city currently spends on signals and 4,600 street lights. Williams wasn’t immediately sure how much it spends on signals alone.

Bellingham’s Public Works department handles traffic lights for Whatcom County, Ferndale and Lynden, which are also using the LEDs, Williams said.

Bellingham Public Works automatically has installed the LED lights in signals that have been redesigned in those jurisdictions, he said.

The county plans to replace green and red lights in all of its signals this year, Jim Karcher, engineering manager for Whatcom County, wrote in an e-mail.

The LEDs were purchased from Dialight Corp., with offices in New Jersey and manufacturing plants in North Carolina, Mexico and Germany. The company was founded in 1938 to produce instrument panel lights for aircraft and automobiles and is now the industry leader in LED traffic signals, according to its Web site.

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