A new study will determine if LED street lights can save Kansas City, Mo., money.
It looked like a bunch of men playing with a radio-powered toy tank on Municipal Avenue Monday night. What looked like a toy tank was actually a GPS-equipped robot named Scotty, supplied by the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility-funded nonprofit.
Scotty measured how well Kansas City's existing street lights were illuminating the streets, the first step in a two-year study examining new street light technology.
The existing lights are high-pressure sodium, the standard in city street lights for years.
"These are, by far, one of the most efficient lighting sources for outdoor lights," said Mahmud Hadjian, manager of Street Lighting Services for Kansas City, Mo., Public Works.
But now, there's a new product in the efficiency race, and manufacturers claim it cuts costs by 30-50 percent.
LED lights are not new, but they are in large-scale outdoor projects like a city street. Now, the Kansas City Public Works Department is participating in a federally-funded study to see if switching to LED lights would lighten the load on the city. Hadjian said it will take two years of data collection before city officials can determine if those manufacturer's claims hold up.
"It's going to take two years to go through the cycles of cold and heat, summers and winters," he explained, "which can have an effect on the system."
The city got free samples from nine different companies, five of each, which they'll be installing this week in nine locations.
Federal officials will do the number crunching and will look at power usage, burnout rates and other cost factors to see if and when the outlay is worth the savings.
Hadjian said the combined energy and maintenance cost for Kansas City street lights currently runs at about $7 million per year.
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