Solution
According to City Engineer Barbara Lynch, “The city had adopted their Climate Action Plan, so our goal is to reduce energy usage. Upgrading the street lights was a natural evolution of the energy saving move. LEDs have low maintenance and long life to them, which is always helpful when you are talking about impacts to staff and workloads.”
Lynch adds: “The other thing we looked to was the Los Angeles testing.” In 2009, the City of Los Angeles began a massive project to upgrade their street lighting system — the second largest in the country — with LED technology. Cree met or exceeded the expected performance, cost savings and sustainability goals of that project and made the short list of approved LED fixtures for “cobra head” street lights, with an estimated 140,000 fixtures being installed in LA over the next four years. As Lynch confirms, “If you weren’t part of the Los Angeles project, you weren’t anywhere on our list. We want to invest in a fixture that’s going to be high quality, that’s going to last, is easy to maintain and provides the light we want. We want value for our money.”
As a result, San Luis Obispo upgraded almost the entire city with 2,165 Cree® XSP Series LED street lights. As Tom Lorish of PG&E states, "At the time we were putting the project together, the XSP Series was the new jump in performance, both from a technical perspective and a price performance perspective." Cree’s XSP Series delivers up to 100 lumens per watt and up to double the lumens per dollar of previous generations of LED street lights. Beyond these substantial savings in energy consumption and cost, the XSP Series offers better optical control with the NanoOptic® Precision Delivery Grid™ optic, delivering light where the town wants it, not where they don’t.