Ed Ebrahimian loves to stare out of the plane window on night flights home to Los Angeles. Next time you fly into LA late, take a good look and see why. Five years ago, a bright orange blanket of light used to saturate the city and stain the air above. Today, it’s a metropolis aglow with tens of thousands of cool silvery pinpoint lights. The grid is clearer. The skies are blacker.
“The lights look like candles now and they aren’t glaring at all,” Ebrahimian gushes. “The sky glow is the most amazing thing I’ve seen in my life.”
Ebrahimian has good reason to be enthused. As director of LA’s Bureau of Street Lighting, he’s overseeing one of the largest relighting projects in the world, spending $57 million to retrofit the city’s 215,000 lights, which come in more than 400 styles. The money has gotten him only to lamp post number 155,000 after five years. Replacing the remaining 60,000 will cost $50 million more.
Los Angeles is a dramatic front in an important and overlooked battle facing the rapidly urbanising world: The struggle between light and dark. Cities and businesses want more light everywhere for commercial and safety reasons, but our decades-long saturation bombing of the darkness is blowing holes in electricity budgets, confusing and killing wildlife, and completely erasing our view of the stars, the inspiration for millennia of scientists, poets and explorers. “What was once a most common human experience has become most rare,” writes Paul Bogard, author of The End of Night, a book that assails the world’s unchecked light pollution.
The technology at the centre of the shift is the LED, or light-emitting diode. LEDs are a break from the history of illumination. As solid-state semiconductors, they’re more akin to the processor in your smartphone than the lamp overhead. Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Shanghai, Copenhagen and scores of other cities around the world are deploying LEDs to solve most, if not all, of the problems created by inefficient traditional lamps.
LEDs cost three to four times more than traditional high-pressure street lamps, but they last three to four times longer and produce two to three times more light per watt, delivering anywhere from 30-70 percent in annual electricity savings. Because they are digital chips, they will only get cheaper as the efficiencies of Moore’s Law roll on. And as electronic components, they’re also far more programmable and connect more efficiently with radio and sensor chips to create citywide wireless networks to monitor crime, power outages and water main breaks and coordinate disaster relief.
The business opportunity in the great LED retrofit is enormous. Of the 140 million street lights installed worldwide last year, only 19 million were LEDs, according to IHS Tech- nology. By 2020, LEDs are expected to account for 100 million of the installed base of 155 million street lights. Annual sales of LED street lights will jump from $4.3 billion to $10.2 billion in the same time period. Boston, Seattle and New York City are all undertaking big retrofits. New York’s $76 million project will be the largest in the US: Replacing 250,000 lights by 2017. City officials expect to reap $14 million in energy and maintenance spending per year.
The biggest players in street lighting—Osram, Royal Philips, Acuity Brands and Panasonic—are racing to implement new business models. Manufacturers used to count on selling replacement bulbs and components every four years, but LED lights come with a 10-year warranty, though many will last 15 to 20 years. Several manufacturers are focusing on selling software to control and monitor LED networks from a central command centre or smartphones. Philips launched its CityTouch management software in 2011 to monitor the energy consumption of each light, spot failed lights and dim or brighten each. The company now collects an undisclosed amount of annual service fees from 260 lighting-project owners in 31 countries. Manufacturers and utilities are introducing financing schemes in which they assume the upfront installation costs and take a long-term share of the energy savings from the city.
“The light industry is changing, so we are looking at what our next step is,” says Martin Oerder, head of Global Outdoor Systems at Philips Lighting in the Netherlands.
The social and economic gains from illuminating the night have been incalculable. Electric street lights first began appearing in European capitals in the mid-1800s. Parisians and Londoners marvelled at the light, even if it was so blinding that the lights had to be installed in high towers. America pierced the darkness in April 1879, when the first electric lamp went up in Cleveland. Ever since, it’s been an all-out race to illuminate every road, gas station, warehouse and corner of the country.
LA can dim or brighten any individual pole, controlling the lighting network like a digital army, something that isn’t technically feasible for old-style lamps. The city likes the idea of using flashing light paths to guide its police and firefighters toward and away from emergencies, and it may put that practice in place later. The city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, also ran a pilot project in 2011 that gave the police the ability to dim and blast its LED street lights from their patrol cars. The city used the technology to reduce crime at a park by selectively shining bright lights to disperse people. Even without making the light dance, LA has seen a reduction in crime. Offences such as burglaries and vandalism have fallen by 10 percent between 7 pm and 7 am since 2008. “I’m amazed that this new technology isn’t deployed more throughout the country,” Ebrahimian says.
(This story appears in the 17 October, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)