Duke Energy begins switching all of Raleigh’s streetlights to LED

A contractor for Duke Energy Progress replaced an old sodium vapor streetlight fixture on Beryl Road near the State Fairgrounds on Tuesday with a new LED, the first in an effort to overhaul the city’s streetlights during the next 15 months.

It will cost about $400 on average to replace each streetlight, or $12 million for about 30,000 lights across the city, said Randy Turner, project manager for Duke Energy. But because LED – light-emitting diode – fixtures last longer and use up to 85 percent less energy, the city and Duke Energy stand to come out ahead in the long run.

The city, which leases the lights from Duke Energy, expects to save about $400,000 a year in lower lease payments, said Dustin Brice, who oversees the streetlight program for the city Public Works Department. Duke benefits because the LED lights last 10 to 15 years, compared to about five for the old models, Turner said.

Raleigh joins a growing number of cities and towns that have gone to LED streetlights. Duke Energy Progress has already changed out lights in Garner, Holly Springs and Cary and is in the midst of replacing 100,000 mercury vapor street and area lights with LEDs across the state, Turner said.

In addition to using less energy, the LED fixtures produce a light that is clearer and more uniform than the orangish tint of sodium vapor lights, Brice said. Raleigh has used the lights in places downtown and along Hillsborough Street for several years, and they got good reviews when the city tested LED fixtures in five other places around town in 2012.

“The light quality was better,” Brice said. “Residents were very pleased with it, from the feedback we got.”

Despite the better quality, the city wasn’t in a hurry to change the lights citywide until more recently, when advances in technology and mass production brought down the cost of LED fixtures. Turner says LEDs now cost about 50 percent less than they did three years ago.

The fixtures belong to Duke Energy. The company will charge the city $600,000, or $50 per fixture, to replace 12,000 lights that are less than 20 years old. But the company will switch out the other 18,000 at no cost to the city.

It might seem counter-intuitive for a company to install equipment so its customers use less of its product, but power companies have long had efficiency programs aimed at helping their customers use less electricity. Companies and their regulators like the programs because they offset the need to build expensive new power plants.

In addition, said Duke Energy spokeswoman Meredith Archie, “Our customers are asking for the newest technology, and this is partly a response to that.”

Duke Energy considered several vendors for the Raleigh lights, including Durham-based Cree, Archie said. In the end, it chose fixtures made by American Electric Lighting, a subsidiary of Atlanta-based Acuity Lighting Group.

This story was originally published September 29, 2015 at 5:36 PM with the headline "Duke Energy begins switching all of Raleigh’s streetlights to LED."