No more dim bulbs for this town.
The city is embarking on a mammoth project to swap out every one of its 250,000 streetlights by 2017, replacing them with brighter, energy-saving lamps.
The new LED (for light-emitting-diode) lamps will cost the city $79 million, but is expected to save $14 million a year in maintenance and energy costs.
The LEDs have an expected lifetime of up to 20 years, compared with about six for the current sodium “cobra-head” bulbs.
“All of these new forms of lighting, particularly LEDs, use dramatically less [energy] — it’s not a small percentage,” Mayor Bloomberg said at a press conference in Brooklyn announcing the initiative. “That’s why the payback is so big and why everybody’s going to do it. It’s sort of a no-brainer.”
Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said the city has already switched to LED traffic lights and pedestrian signals with countdown clocks.
Street lights on Eastern Parkway in central Brooklyn, pedestrian paths in Central Park and certain fixtures on FDR Drive have also already been swapped — cutting energy costs by between 50 and 83 percent, according to city officials.
The first of three phases will swap 80,000 lights starting in Brooklyn next spring, with an expected completion date in December 2015. That portion of the project will cost $20.5 million.