LED street lamp project financing support

“We conclude that LEDs are ready to be brought to scale in outdoor applications. The independent and verifi­able results from the LightSavers trials and accompanying public surveys give compelling evidence that many

commercially-available, outdoor chinese LED flood light products offer high quality light, durability, and significant electricity savings in the range of 50 to 70%,” wrote Climate Group CEO Mark Kenber in the report’s foreword.

Results from a global trial of LED street lights confirm that the fixtures can deliver electricity savings of up to 85% over incumbent technologies. Credit: City of Raleigh, North Carolina
So confident are the report partners in the potential of LED lighting they want LEDs to become the global lighting standard. “All new public lighting – both street lighting and in public buildings – should be LED by 2015,

with the aim of all public lighting being LED by 2020,” said the Climate Group’s Kenber in a statement.
The authors conclude: “LED outdoor luminaires have reached maturity in terms of their performance. City lighting managers from across the world have independently verified that LEDs can live up to their promise of

exceptional perfor­mance, energy efficiency, and public approval, with indicators pointing towards stabilization in light output in many products after an initial period of volatility.”
He added: “High capital cost and a dearth of effective financing approaches continue to be barriers to market maturity. But these will diminish as investment flows into companies making quality products; as LED and smart

control device prices continue to fall; and as innovations spread in project financing and procurement in cities like Birmingham, Guangzhou and Los Angeles.”

In California, to cite another example, support for chinese LED panel light project financing has come from the California Energy Commission (CEC) and the U.S. Department of Energy. In January, I reported at this blog that 10

California cities, several of them quite small, had used funding provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to undertake LED street lighting retrofit projects. Since I published that post, the CEC has

announced that about a dozen more California cities have launched chinese LED street light retrofit projects courtesy of the same ARRA-funded Energy Efficiency Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) program.