WESTFIELD – During the past year, motorists and residents on East Mountain Road have been part of an experiment being conducted by the Westfield Gas and Electric Department, which installed light emitting diode, or LED, lights along the road.
“East Mountain Road is a long thoroughfare which runs from Route 20 to Route 202, and we just wanted to see if the community would accept them (the LEDs),” said Aaron Bean, the G&E’s operation superintendent. “We haven’t been getting any complaints, and the light from the LEDs is whiter. Studies have shown that the quality of light is much better than the old high-pressure sodium bulbs.”
What were once exorbitantly expensive lights, the price for implementing approximately 3,733 LED streetlights citywide has now decreased to the point where installation is a feasible reality, projected to cost the city $1.2 million in total.
“We budget for a portion of this year over year as funds are available. As the technology improves, the price comes down,” Bean said. “They are becoming more available for residential settings, and more LEDs are coming into the market, which is bringing the cost down.”
“They direct light better and in more of an oval pattern,” he said, stating that the LEDs decrease the amount of ‘light noise‘ that reaches the lawns of other customers. “If you go on Google and look up the night sky, you can see a lot of the metropolitan areas, which we call ‘light noise.’ It’s a big problem for aviation pilots passing over head.”
Bean said that other area municipalities, such as Holyoke, have applied for and been given grants to begin the process of overhauling their streets with LED lights.
“I’m not sure the status of their project,” he said. “But other communities like Easthampton have been using late model LEDs, too.”
Holyoke Gas and Electric General Manager Jim Lavelle said Wednesday that the project is nearing completion in his city.
“We’re in the third of the four phases of conversion and should be done around June,” he said. “We’ve had a handful of complaints, mostly because the light is more focused with LEDs and some customers liked that their properties were getting partially lit by the streetlights.”
Holyoke is replacing around 4,000 lights in total according to Lavelle, a number close to the figure of 3,700 mentioned by Bean for Westfield, and said that Holyoke received a grant during the first year of the project from the Green Community Fund.
“That grant accounted for less than 10 percent of the cost,” he said, adding that the project is being funded from the G&E’s operations budget. “The payback will occur over the next 10 years because these lights have lower energy and maintenance costs.”
Lavelle said that the initial projected cost of the LED overhaul was $1.5 million, but that costs have gone down due to decreases in the costs of the lights during each phase of the project.
“It’ll probably be closer to $1.2 or $1.3 million by the end of the last phase,” he said.
In Northampton, Energy and Sustainability Officer Chris Mason said his city is also looking to expand upon a similar endeavor to Westfield’s East Mountain Road experiment.
“We put LEDs in one parking lot and we hope to move forward with ornamental and street lights within a year,” said Mason. “We’re working on it.”
“Until recently, National Grid didn’t have a rate tariff that would allow us to go to LEDs,” he said. “Easthampton was contracted with Western Mass Electric, and their rate tariff is actually lucrative for LEDs.”
In Easthampton, LED implementation began in 2002, when the city started talking with WMECO about purchasing its streetlights.
“We began the conversation in 2002, but it didn’t culminate until 2006,” said Michael Tauznik, the city’s mayor from 1996 to 2013. “We became a Green Community in 2010, and had been looking at new technologies to replace the streetlights.”
Tautznik said that the city’s leadership wasn’t high on LEDs initially, but that the results have been undeniable since their implementation.
“LEDs took some time to really mature. We looked at them for two to three years before we put out the RFP and got comfortable with them,” he said. “But, of the 460-465 lights we put up, we’ve had only one failure which was promptly fixed. They’ve served a purpose and have been well-received by the community.”
Tautznick said that the city’s old streetlights required 311 watts, while the LEDs toned the energy usage down to 88, contributing to a $40,000 reduction in maintenance and repairs.
“The whole project was $220,000. Twenty to 25 percent was paid for by WMECO, about $60,000,” Tautznik said. “Their motto is basically ‘if you can save energy, they’ll help pay for it.’ The other $160,000 was paid in Green Community grants.”
Bean is confident the project will have an impact similar to those felt in Easthampton and Holyoke.
“We’re going to focus on the most-traveled roads,” he said. “There will be an overall maintenance reduction, as these bulbs have a 20-year lifespan. Our current street light bulbs burnout every two to three years.”
For the G&E, reducing the expenses associated with maintaining streetlights is a welcome perk of overhauling the city’s lighting.
“Patroling power lines at night, rolling out the trucks to replace lamps when neighbors call in, it’s expensive,” Bean said. “The LEDs have a photocell on top of them, so when the sun comes out, the lights turn off.”
Bean added that the photocell itself may need to be changed once or twice in a six-year period, and that the city’s taxpayers will be the ones who benefit most from the additions.
“These LEDs require three times less maintenance than with normal lights,” he said. “This passes down to the rate payers in the district, as the city will use 50 percent less electricity than is being used currently.”
