Cities across the world have already begun the LED Street Light Switch-over. One of the first large cities is; Anchorage, Alaska.
They plan on changing approximately 16,000 traditional street lights with the new LED Street Lighting technology. This only equates to about 1/4 of the total street lights in Anchorage, yet they expect to cut the entire cities lighting energy costs by 30% or around $400,000 a year.
Anchorage Alaska – LED Street Lights
From their conception and first production in the 1960’s, LEDs have been the perfect piece for for every indicator imaginable and still are today. At first 15 Lumens per watt LEDs were far from bright and could never be used for general lighting applications. Incandescent’s and the fairly new technology Compact Fluorescent’s dominated the market.
In 2003 a new type of LED was demonstrated by the company Cree, Inc. to provide a commercially packaged white light giving 65 Lumens per watt. This new technology became the brightest white LED commercially available at the time, and more than four times as efficient as standard incandescent Light Bulbs. Shortly thereafter an 80 Lumens per watt LED was created and is the main concept diode of which our LED Line utilizes.
We have sucessfully created a LED chip capable of 156 Lumens per watt. Large producton is expected to commence by 2012.