LED Street Lights Offer Additional Advantages

LED technology offers significant benefits in the established streetlight market. Up until a few years ago, this market relied upon mature sodium and metal halide lighting technologies.

LED technology has many benefits for street lighting. Adding an LED shunt protector provides an added degree of reliability by allowing current to flow around an inoperable LED to keep the remaining good LEDs in the streetlight operating.

These lighting technologies are well understood and reliable, however, are now scrutinized from an economical as well as an environmental point of view. Many public services budgets are now under increased pressure, which has lead to a closer examination of not just the installation and maintenance costs of streetlights, but also the ongoing costs of operating them. Coupled with incentives for reduction in CO2 emissions, LED lighting has begun to demonstrate a lot of advantages that has prompted more widespread adoption.

The principle advantages of LED lighting are its long life, which can be as long as 100,000 hours or 20 years, and its inherent energy efficiency. They have been shown to use 15 percent of the energy and give off less heat than an incandescent bulb while generating more light per watt. LEDs do not contain toxic chemicals such as mercury, compared to high-pressure sodium lamps or mercury-vapor lamps. Because of their long lives, there are reduced maintenance costs and are an optimal solution for lighting in places where replacing light bulbs is expensive, inconvenient or otherwise difficult.

LED street lights offer additional advantages that include enhanced night visibility from increased color rendering, color temperature and brightness uniformity. Plus, they can be turned on quickly because no warm up is needed, and they do not produce ultraviolet light, which is what attracts bugs. With an LED streetlight design, developers also have more flexibility in controlling light levels which opens up the opportunity to implement programmable controls, and direct light on specific areas from the directional light LEDs emit in one direction.

Public services and utilities organizations calculate streetlight cost of ownership as the total of their installation, maintenance and ongoing electricity costs. LED technology has had previous false starts where light output, reliability or temperature effects have resulted in a disappointing outcome. With a reported 20% of global energy used for lighting, the energy cost and CO2 reduction advantages realized with LED technology has resulted in LED technology gaining more positive acceptance for streetlights.