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City of Redlands, California |
An advance in lighting technology in the 1990s is significantly reducing the energy consumption of conventional traffic lights while increasing reliability and public safety at the same time.
Operating 24 hours a day, traffic signals are both a large consumer of energy and a key to public safety. In regulating traffic flow, they are also an important factor in the energy efficiency of motor vehicles as a whole. After decades of little change, a technological innovation began to take hold in the mid-1990s.
Traditional incandescent bulbs are being replaced by lamps deploying light-emitting diodes (LEDs). The new LED traffic lights consume only 10% the wattage of their predecessors and last much longer, which lowers the frequency and cost of replacement. Nationwide, more than 30% of traffic lights have been converted to the LED type. The replacement rate so far in California is estimated at 50%.
The California Energy Commission (CEC) has funded a project since 2001 providing loans and grants to municipalities to replace incandescent traffic signals with LEDs. The new traffic lights also come with a battery backup that provides power to the signal in the event of a power failure so that lights continue to operate and traffic continues to flow safely. In this case, the agency used the energy savings to increase public safety on the state's highways and busy intersections.
For background on the project, see the CEC March 2002 press release.
See also the SEP case study published in May 2004 and titled "California Says 'Go' to Energy Saving Traffic Lights".
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