# Portland Street lights go LED



## jeffc (May 30, 2013)

In December 2012 Portland City Council authorized Portland’s Bureau of Transportation to convert all of Portland’s street lights to high efficiency LEDs (light emitting diodes). The conversion will save the City $32 million over the 25-year life of the new lights and will cut energy use for street lighting in half.

Energy Projects at City of Portland Facilities | City of Portland Energy Challenge | The City of Portland, Oregon


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## Coug Dad (May 30, 2013)

They installed some of those here.  The problem is that the LED's do not generate enough heat to melt the snow and ice in the winter so the lights get blocked.


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## jeffc (May 30, 2013)

I hear that is the case with traffic lights as well. Also, if you buy LED lights, I would recommend that they are certified by an independent organization like Lighting Design Lab or Lighting Design Consortium. Many LED products don’t have the stated light output or don’t last as long as they state.


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## ICE (May 31, 2013)

It seems wrong that we light all the streets in all of the cities all night long for a few people.  They should all be on motion sensors like our front porches.


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## fatboy (May 31, 2013)

ICE said:
			
		

> It seems wrong that we light all the streets in all of the cities all night long for a few people.  They should all be on motion sensors like our front porches.


That would be awesome........@ at Coug Dad..........that would be a problem here.

Glad to see you back.


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## jar546 (May 31, 2013)

There is a big movement to do this all over the country for the past 2 years.  There are programs through some POCOs that rebate municipalities for doing so.  I never thought about the snow issue but how can the snow accumulate on the bottom?


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## globe trekker (May 31, 2013)

> I never thought about the snow issue but how can the snow accumulate on the bottom?


Freezing rain can leave a sheet over the lens, and be a cooler surface upon which more humiditycan collect (i.e. - snow / ice crystals).

.


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## conarb (May 31, 2013)

Roger Pielke is a well known climate scientist, usually on the side of the environmentalists.



			
				Roger Pielke said:
			
		

> The spectre of catastrophic climate change offered a new opportunity  for the strategists and marketing specialists at Philips headquarters.  They changed their marketing concept and jumped on the Global Warming  band wagon. From that moment on, energy-saving bulbs could be put on the  market as icons of responsibility toward climate change. This would  give Philips a head start in the CFL end LED business. The competition  would be left far behind by aggressive use of European patent law. That  strategy fitted like a glove with that of the environmental movement.  For them, ordinary light bulbs had become the ultimate symbol of energy  waste and excessive CO2 emissions. Seeing the opportunity, Greenpeace  immediately made a forward pass with the ball thrown by Philips’  pitchers. The incandescent bulb would serve as an ideal vehicle for  ramming Global Warming down people’s throats. No abstract discussions  about CO2-emissions any more: a ban on bulbs would suffice. Not unlike  the misguided banning of DDT in the name of environmentalism, which  leads to the loss of countless lives due to malaria. Come to think of it, banning incandescent bulbs makes only marginal  sense. The energy savings of CFL’s are small. They are somewhat more  efficient when you take into account only the number of lumens per watt  of electrical power, but they cost a lot more to produce. Also, their  real life expectancy often is much less than the 7,000 hours promised in  the ads. And don’t forget that they contain a few milligrams of  mercury, which contaminates the environment when they are not disposed  of properly. Most of them aren’t – a scary thought.
> 
> Is it fair to judge light bulbs on the efficiency with which they  convert watts into lumens? The combined lobby from Big Business and Big  Environment has attempted to convince us that old-fashioned bulbs waste a  lot of energy. They ignore the inconvenient truth that the efficiency  of common light bulbs is in fact a full 100%. All the “waste heat” helps  to heat the house. In wintertime, when days are short and cold, every  contribution to home heating is welcome. In summertime the days are long  and there is hardly any need for artificial lights. The incandescent  bulb may give only a little bit of light, but it also produces a lot of  useful heating.  ¹


¹ The Unholy Alliance between Philips and the Greens – A Guest Weblog by Joost van Kasteren and Henk Tennekes | Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr.


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## jeffc (May 31, 2013)

Conarb, The article you referred to has many opinions expressed but is short on facts. For facts, Wikipedia is a good start,  "Incandescent bulbs are much less efficient than most other types of lighting; most incandescent bulbs convert less than 5% of the energy they use into visible light[1] (with the remaining energy being converted into heat). The luminous efficacy of a typical incandescent bulb is 16 lumens per watt, compared to the 60 lm/W of a compact fluorescent bulb." I could reference several people to confirm that energy efficient lights are cost effective but I think discussion should transcend opinions and be a fact based. The lamps do have mercury but if you are an area that generates electricity from coal, you are releasing more mercury into the atmosphere from burning the extra coal to power the less efficient lamp than what is contained in the lamp (Are Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs Dangerous?: Scientific American). The article mentions that incandescent lights are 100% efficient. Sure the heat can used to heat the building but what if you are in an area that needs air conditioning? These lamps would put an addition load on the A/C system.


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## conarb (May 31, 2013)

I can't find a Canadian study that I saw about 10 years ago, the study concluded in cold climates like most of Canada incandescents were a better choice than CFLs since all energy is expended as light or heat, the heat offsetting heating costs.

Another thing that I've always wondered about was someetime in the 70s they added strings of lights to the Bay Bridge to make it look pretty, Oakland also added lights encircling Lale Merritt in the center of the city.  After this whole environmental craze started and they required that the citizenry convert to CFLs the Bay Bridge and Lake Merritt continued to burn brightly, I lived above the Bay and had a view of San Francisco that included the pretty lights.  We have now built a new half of the Bay Bridge replete with a full complement of LED lights, in fact a lighting artiest has





 for a few years to attract tourists and presumably fill the government coffers.


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## Anna Sanders (Apr 27, 2019)

Are they using Dynamo for these baby lights?


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## tmurray (May 10, 2019)

conarb said:


> I can't find a Canadian study that I saw about 10 years ago, the study concluded in cold climates like most of Canada incandescents were a better choice than CFLs since all energy is expended as light or heat, the heat offsetting heating costs.
> 
> Another thing that I've always wondered about was someetime in the 70s they added strings of lights to the Bay Bridge to make it look pretty, Oakland also added lights encircling Lale Merritt in the center of the city.  After this whole environmental craze started and they required that the citizenry convert to CFLs the Bay Bridge and Lake Merritt continued to burn brightly, I lived above the Bay and had a view of San Francisco that included the pretty lights.  We have now built a new half of the Bay Bridge replete with a full complement of LED lights, in fact a lighting artiest has
> 
> ...



I know this is an old post...

The study you are referring to was completed by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (crown corp owned by the federal government). CMHC owns a pair of test houses that sit side by side and are identical. They put incandescents in one building and ran CFLs in the other building. after one calender year, and extrapolating out for the lifespan of a CFL bulb, it indicated a savings of $1 for the life of a CFL bulb. That's assuming they last as long as they are supposed to. Which they don't because people are supposed to wear gloves when they are installing them to avoid leaving oil on the bulb and creating a hot spot.

I don't know that they repeated the study with LED bulbs.


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