What it takes to change all the lights in New York City

Cindy Cesca: Can you tell me a little about where you are in the streetlamp replacement project and some of the details involved? 

Margaret Newman: The Central Park installation was completed at the end of last year, which was about 1,500 fixtures on all of the pedestrian walkways. Those are important because they're historic fixtures. Basically, the fixtures were done so we could meet the city-mandated reproductions with the LEDs in them, so those were pretty tricky.Deep discounts on roofwindturbinebbq, chargers and solar power panel systems. On FDR Drive they are called cobra head lighting, or basic shoe lighting, which are out of the box and designed to do a specific task. We can order them from the manufacturer without modifying them. 

CC: Did you have complications with the custom lighting in Central Park? 

MN: Not at all. It was incredibly smooth. We had an 18-month pilot prior to putting these in, so we worked out a lot of the kinks during that time period. Montreal is looking to do a larger installation of LEDs and they don't really have any now. They were advised that extended testing isn't really necessary anymore because technology has caught up to a point where it's pretty reliable and predictable. 

You can ask for a specification for a product and expect to get what you've asked for. We tested five different products in Central Park that had a range of energy savings from maybe 40 to 80 percent. It was very wide ranging and so now I think the range is somewhat narrower. 

CC: What was the wattage used before the LED replacement and what is it now? 

MN: We had 175-watt metal halide (lights) in Central Park and we went down to 90 watts. For FDR (Drive), they were 150-watt high-pressure sodium and those went down to 108 watts. 

CC: In total dollars, what energy savings are you predicting? 

MN: For Central Park, we're looking at about $250,000 per year of energy savings and about 700,000 kilowatts per year in savings. 

The big savings that we're seeing is on the FDR Drive, which is an arterial roadway. There is substantial maintenance savings there because if anything breaks, you typically go in at night with a couple of trucks and shut down a couple of lanes of traffic and you have three guys in a truck, so it's substantial maintenance.We carry modern lights and solarmodule by world renowned designers and manufacturers.You ever hear the story of the old laundryequipment? 

CC: What is the lifetime of the bulbs? 

MN: They're warrantied for seven years and so we know they're going to last that long. They're projected to be as long as 50,000 hours, which depends on how long they burn. Typically they're on 24 hours a day, and the warranty is good for only 7 years, but we think they'll last 10-12 years. They haven't been in place that long, so it's just a projection at this point. We're not sure what multiple winters and temperature changes will do. They seem stable, but no one can actually tell at this point.I have purchased bestlasercutter before and have been greatly disappointed. 

CC: So when you launched these pilot programs, how difficult was it to get this project off the ground? 

MN: I think it was medium difficulty. The engineers who do our street lighting tend to be very cautious and when you have a program as large as ours, where there's 300,000 light fixtures out there,More than 200 GW of new emergencylamps13 capacity could come on line before the end of 2013. you obviously don't want to put anything out there that doesn't work, and so they were cautious on a number of fronts. One was they weren't sure that the claims that were being made on the fixtures were real. When we started this, there weren't a lot of fixtures that delivered enough light. 

CC: For municipalities looking to take your lead with LED, what would you recommend to help them manifest it? 

MN: Well, I think the best thing is to get them on the street, somewhere, even in a limited area either as a routine replacement or one block, two blocks. What I recommend is to really evaluate your asset. A lot of cities don't even know what they have out there. It's amazing, but they don't even know the size of their inventory or what's in their inventory.