Raleigh officials envision "world's first" LED lit city
By Darren Murph 
posted Feb 14th 2007 10:09AM
posted Feb 14th 2007 10:09AM
While it's no secret that LEDs light up the night in a more efficient (albeit expensive) manner, few locales have given the idea of lighting up the town en masse with LEDs any serious consideration. In a feat that would surely oust Brussles' Dexia Tower in terms of magnitude, city officials in Raleigh, North Carolina are hoping to make the Capital City the "world's first LED city." Reportedly envisioned by the mayor, officials are teaming up with RTP-based Cree, Inc. in order to "save money and help the environment," and in a pilot program completed late last year, a LED-equipped parking deck purportedly burned "40-percent less energy" than those with "standard lighting systems." Additionally, the quality and brightness of the lighting was said to have improved, which paved the way for LEDs to hit up street lights, architectural and accent lighting, and pedestrian and walkway lights over the next 18 months. If things go as planned, the entire city will "convert permanently to LED lighting," hopefully saving around $80,000 a year in parking deck utility bills alone -- and hey, if nobody in charge can figure out how to use an extra 80 large per year, there's a few [Via TWW]
wouldn't compact fluorescent save as much, but be much much cheaper than LED? they're 4 bucks for 3 at home depot now. i'm not sure if they make floodlights though.
I'm guessing they already have flourescents. LED's save about 90% over incandescents, and these are only supposed to save 40%.
Local stories RULE!
Hillsborough Street is indeed crater mile.
This is pretty cool. It's nice to see my native NC doing something nice for a change, even though Raleigh isn't the best looking city here. Also, NC State sucks. Go Heels! (And yes, I say this even though State beat them and they just got swept by Va Tech).
All I can say is, "HOORAY FOR OUR CITY!"
Hopefully they remember to make these full-cutoff, so they don't cause light pollution that interferes with astronomy, etc.
"wouldn't compact fluorescent save as much, but be much much cheaper than LED?"
Yes, but they are not a viable alternative. The LED lights will likely last for at least a decade (assuming they are on 12 hours a day, and LEDs have a life of 50,000 hours). This far outweighs their high cost, as flourescents only last about 8,000 hours, plus the man-hours of changing all those bulbs has to cost quite a bit.
Besides the life, there are other problems with flourescents that people don't think about. The biggest one that I can think of of the top of my head is that they are a trigger to migraines in some people (my mother is one of them).
So yes, flourescents would technically be cheaper (at least initially), but they are not a better solution.
The company manufacturing/supplying the LED's, is based in RTP, and it's founders are grads of NC STATE(in Raleigh) so I'm sure there is some kind of local business kick back going on. I'm sure there was some "buddy lobbying" to get this passed in the Raleigh City Budget. Its a shame when people disguise insider handshakes as Environmentalism.
But hey... who needs improvements to real infrastructure, like mass transit to decongest that hellish traffic and improve air quality, when we have shiny new lights in our parking garages! Politics....it's a shady business...even when lit by LED ;)
...and BTW Glenwood needs a helluva lot more improvement than Hillsborough.
I have also noticed that the CF bulbs I have used tend to not work well in the cold. Most will have a slight discoloration at the initial startup, but then have the color stabilize after a few minutes. However when I have tested them in my shed, with weather in the 30 - 40 range, they tend to be very pink-ish and not very bright.
i have always said that cities should use LEDs for there lighting, and now this one is lol. same wit LED Xmas lights. i said that stuff like 5 years ago when i first started using them
you are such a genius, here's a cookie
Anyone know which parking deck (name) downtown is using these?
hesh - NC State RULES! go Wolfpack!!!
i spent a lot of my childhood in Raleigh, it'll be interesting to go back there once they get this done . . .
There's a video report about this story at Raleigh TV station WRAL's web site.
http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/1201312/
Little-known fact about WRAL -- it's one of the few TV stations out there whose online video is viewable in the Wii web browser.
I like LED's as much... probably more than the next guy. But this a just a feel good, politically correct, please vote be back into office, all politicians stink (really) story. I just bought a very expensive CREE based flashlight based of of the most efficient LED you can buy. Slighty brighter than my Surefire Z2 with the brighter lamp assembly and just stomps all over it for run time. However, even these NEW LED's cannot match lumens per watt (real lumens per watt, not that crazy stuff that LED manufactures tried to pass a few years ago) of a high pressure metal halide or sodium lamp. CREE's current production of high efficiency LED's run about 70 LPW(Lumens per Watt), where you can buy halide and sodium lamps that run from 130 to 150 LPW. That's twice the efficiency and you can get FAR MORE light in a single package. Bulb life? Average 24,000 hours, so no real concern here either. I do believe LED's will have their day in a few yers. Cree has demonstrated 131 LPW in a lab (unverified). But today, anyone preaching they are looking out for you by replacing all the outdoor public lighting is probably... a politician.
Nice to know you feel free to impugn the credibility and integrity of people based upon no evidence at all.
Good work.
I am on the Raleigh Environmental Advisory Board. I can tell you that the city is working very hard to analyze and reduce its energy usage. This is one way to do it.
And it has the added benefit of proving LED's can work in these kinds of situations, which, yes, will help a significant local business.
Sounds like good government to me.
Buildings and street lights would benefit the most from LEDs. A home consumer looks at the light and says "wow $25 for a lightbulb, that will take me 10 years to break even on energy costs"
Building and street lights are on ALL the time though (or at least all the time during night) so they will save money more quickly because they would normally burn through bulbs faster. Plus the cost of hiring someone with a bucket truck to go replace burnt out street lights will go down since LED lights need to be replaced a fraction of regular lights
Now that we can see the parking spaces, let's open them up on weekends so we can actually find a decent, free parking space downtown.
LEDs can pose some significant savings in the right applications...It has only been recently that LEDs (particularly white LEDs) have gotten bright enough to be a viable alternative to incandescent bulbs.
Take traffic signals, for example...I doubt you will find a single new traffic signal that does not at the very least use LEDs for the red light. Many are now using them for the yellow and green lights as well. A number of existing lights have been retrofitted and the local transport authorities seem to love the fact that they aren't spending as much time changing bulbs any more.
I wonder how many of these lights they're going to lose to "vandals" who want more efficient lights in their own homes?
Considering the price, there will be some people who would jump at the five finger discount. Or turn a tidy profit reselling them on eBay.
Isn't it more expensive to run LEDs all of the time though?
Don't believe the hype.
LED is nowhere near a mature technology yet. LEDs may look cool in your computer case and give a brighter light than those tiny incandescent flashlight bulbs, but trying to replace big gas discharge bulbs with LEDs is just insanity.
1. LEDs need LOTS of heatsinking. Their l/W output is terrible, and unlike an incandescent, halogen or gas discharge bulb, the heat can't be thrown out the front, it HAS to be heatsinked.
2. LEDs are tiny, tiny sources of light - they will cause lots of glare if not used with diffusers. Whereas gas discharge bulbs don't suffer with diffusers.
3. They're too expensive, and the fancy "More than 100 lumens per watt" are invariably tiny LEDs running at less than 1 watt.
4. The parking garage bulbs are not incandescent - they are already high-efficiency mercury vapor/metal halide or very high-efficiency high pressure sodium or ultra-high efficiency low pressure sodium.
So in conclusion, don't believe the hype.
Peoria Illinois has been actively switching to LEDs for a couple years now.
If it is good enough for a parking Garage it must be good enough for the whole city!
Damn Burlington never gets anything good. It's always Raleigh/Durham or Greensboro.
One of the best applications of LEDs I can think of would be Boathouse Row in Philadelphia. The colors can be changed for specific holidays or events. Check it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boathouse_Row
I can only agree with some of the above comments. LEDs have some serious advantages for small-scale lighting applications and they can be switched very fast, which is good for all kinds of signalling applications such as traffic lights. These things were reserved to incandescent lights before and indeed you save a lot of energy by moving to LED.
However when looking at applications such as street lighting, car parks etc., things look terribly different.
High power LEDs bring up the big problem of heat dissipation, usually the higher operating temperature also results in significantly shorter lifetime and lower efficiency. If these problems are going to be solved, the changes will take a number of years to make it to the mass market and become available.
Right now, even small, perfectly cooled lab samples do not reach hallmark efficiency compared to established technologies. And production units are even several years behind that.
High Intensity Discharge lamps in comparison have come a long way of optimization and today provide very high efficiency and colour quality, and they last well beyond 10000 hours. Their disadvantages (long startup time, not suitable for small spaces and low voltages) play no role in these fields of use.
I wonder if Raleigh has been stuck in the early last century or what they light their city with.
Unless they are using candles or incandescent bulbs, they are about to take a big step backwards.
I presume they are now using HID as pretty much every city on the planet does.
Switching to LED may well double their energy consumption while at the same time reducing colour quality, meaning a less comfortable, more straining light. So glad i am not paying my taxes in Raleigh ;)
But congratulations to CREE for the hype...
LEDs definitely use less power than CFs... though as you scale up in size, I don't know if the advantages stay.
CFL go roughly 1/3 of incandescent...
LEDs go as low as 1/10 of incandescent...
But that's really really rough numbers, and depends on a lot of the supporting circuitry etc. to downconvert voltages, etc. There's little doubt you're at least halving the power you use with CFLs by switching to LEDs.
John B
I think evidence was presented that LED is not efficient for this type of application compared to other technologies, so I will impugn away. Questioning decisions made by those in seats of authority is citizens duty. I'm sorry if you were sitting on the Advisory Board and took other peoples biased facts and figures at face value. Maybe you should have done more of your own research (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_bulb_%28disambiguation%29 is a good start...sodium vapor among others looks good ...no?) to present to the Board, rather than listening to presentations of what must have been some form of lobbying from Cree,Progress,and other interested parties.Instead of awarding contracts to change lighting systems to improve Raleigh's environment, maybe the "Board" should get focused on real issues facing the citizens and improve/build a mass transit for the Triangle. Too bad Cree doesn't make light rail systems huh?
John,
I think it is fantastic that you decided to join the discussion. However, I am at a loss at how you missed the evidence I cited as to why LED’s are not the best technology today to use outdoor and public lighting, like your parking garage. Perhaps there is something in particular you disagree with that you’d like to share?
As it has been pointed out by me and others here, there are more efficient technologies that are more mature and more suitable for public lighting. You simply cannot drive even the latest LED’s from Cree (the current leader in LED efficiency) at near the same efficiencies and at their peak efficiency it’d require such low current per LED, that you’d need several hundred to equate the same light output as modern HID, HP Sodium, and especially LP Sodium lights.
Here is a chart that is fairly accurate. It’s a couple of years old, so a slight disadvantage to LED’s, but gets the point across:
http://www.lamptech.co.uk/Images/Illustrations/SO%20Lamp%20Efficacies.jpg
Here are the most recent numbers for luminous efficacy for some common lights in Lumens per Watt:
100w Tungsten – 17.5
Qtz Halogen – 24
Cree XRE @1000ma – 48
Cree XRE@700ma – 55
Cree XRE@350ma – 70
T5 Fluorescent – 104
Xeon Arc – 150
HP Sodium – 150
LP Sodium - 200
The major problem with compact fluorescents is that they contain mercury (although just a tiny bit) and therefore are considered toxic waste. Not a problem with LEDs.
--Jerry