Until you notice 💡

I was looking outside the other day, noticing that fewer and fewer of the street lights are the old-fashioned high-pressure sodium lights once so common in urban streets from the 1980s onwards. The finally replaced that failing bulb on the street outside of my apartment – not with a new high pressure sodium bulb but with an LED.

It seems like only yesterday that the legislature passed a law that allowed municipalities to buy into LED streetlights. The idea at the time was that energy savings of LED technology would come only after a significant upfront payment of purchasing and installing the new units.

The electric utility companies were in no rush to switch to LED streetlight technology, as they collected rent payments from municipalities regardless of the technology they used. Plus the higher cost of operating the high-pressure sodium lamps could just be passed on to the municipalities. Then in 2019, manufacture of high-pressure sodium and mercury vapor lamps stopped, and utilities eventually used up their old stock, and everything started to be coverted over to LED.

Locally, the change over happened first in small towns when even more inefficient mercury vapor bulbs, installed prior to the 1980s, reached the end of their lives. Fixtures that had stood for 50 plus years, finally were retired in favor of much greater energy savings of LED. Happened three or four years ago. But the more recently, I noticed more and more of high-pressure sodium lights disappearing in my own neighborhood, until one day I looked out and the street light in front of my apartment is now LED.