Saving Energy and Money With Solar LED Street Lights

Blurred image of streetlights - saving money and energy with solar led streetlights

Solar LED streetlights have applications in a range of sectors – residential, commercial and public. For homeowners, lighting a long driveway or a large outdoor area can be a significant investment not just to install, but to operate and maintain. Likewise, commercial businesses needing to light parking lots and laneways can find themselves burdened with huge energy costs related to lighting outdoor spaces.

Municipalities, utility providers and provinces across the country face the largest challenges meeting public demand for safe, well lit spaces in an era of rising energy costs and tightening budgets. Solar LED streetlights can provide the solution, offering energy savings as well as reducing the operating, maintenance and ancillary costs.

Many businesses and governments are investigating the technology as an energy and cost-saving measure. In this article, we’ll show you why.  

How Much Money and Energy are Spent on Streetlights?


Compared to ordinary residential lightbulbs, the money and energy that streetlight bulbs consume add up quickly. The standard high-pressure sodium (HPS) lightbulbs that are most commonly found in streetlights can draw up to 1000 watts. Lighting an outdoor space like a parking lot, let alone a system of roads and walkways, can be a substantial part of the budget for businesses, governments and utility companies. Given that utility rates are on the increase, these costs will only rise.

Nate Berg tells Bloomberg that streetlights “are often cities’ biggest or second biggest energy demand, and can amount to somewhere between one-quarter and one-half of a city’s entire energy bill, sometimes even more.” Given how many streetlights span even a small town’s geographical area, that’s not surprising.

“It’s our single-biggest line item besides our waste-water treatment plant,” Alex Chapman, the city of Guelph’s program minister of corporate energy, explained to the CBC. The Ontario city is currently replacing its 13,000 HPS streetlights with LEDs. Electricity for the HPS streetlights costs the city of 135,000 people $1.74 million and uses 10 million kWh every year.

How Much Money and Energy Does Switching to LEDs Save?


Much like their residential counterparts, LED streetlight bulbs create significant energy savings. Energy savings estimates vary, but all suggest significant decreases in energy consumption. Manitoba Hydro, now in the process of replacing the province’s HPS streetlights with LEDs, estimates their new LEDs will consume 60% less energy.

The utility says that the energy savings from switching from HPS streetlights to LEDs throughout the province will save “27,000 tonnes of indirect greenhouse gas emissions, which is equivalent to removing 5,400 cars from the road.”

The City of Guelph says its new lights will save them about $750,000 per year between energy savings and the lower rate of maintenance and bulb replacement.

Currently in Guelph, streetlight bulbs are replaced every 5 years, so although the initial capital cost of converting to LEDs is higher than it would be to replace worn out lights with new HPS bulbs, Chapman estimates that the new LED bulbs “will pay for themselves in about six years.”

To really maximize the cost savings of converting to LED, though, governments and corporations should consider pairing LEDs with solar technology. Solar energy is a particularly good match for LED lights, given the low power they draw. And the rising accessibility of solar technology makes solar a good investment, especially in the long run.

The Decreasing Price of Solar Energy


Woman looking up at streetlight in foggy park - saving money and energy with solar led streetlights

Up until recently, the cost of converting to solar LED lighting has given businesses and governments pause over the investment. Now, however, converting to solar makes more economic sense than relying on non-renewable forms of energy. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) states that the cost of utility-scale solar photovoltaics declined 82% between 2010-2019, “reaching nearly seven cents (USD 0.068) per kilowatt-hour (kWh) in 2019.”

PV Magazine cites “improved technology, economies of scale, supply chain competitiveness and the growing experience of developers” as factors in the cost reductions associated with solar energy.

It’s great news for those interested in transitioning infrastructure like streetlights over to solar. As the cost of solar energy itself decreases, technology is expected to improve, and the cost of purchasing solar streetlights or converting existing streetlights to solar is expected to decrease.

Swanson’s Law


This decrease is in line with Swanson’s law, named for researcher and solar manufacturer Richard Swanson. Tam Hunt writes that the law “states that with every doubling of production and shipments of [solar PV] panels, there has been a 20 percent reduction in the cost of panels.”

Hunt explains that despite this law, the cost of solar systems still varies globally because installation, permitting and other “soft costs” that make up the price of getting solar technology up and running vary by country. Early adopter countries like Germany have much lower prices for solar technology than we see in North America because that technology is much more mainstream. To really bring the costs of solar down, Hunt says, a country needs to get to scale.

The more a country adopts solar technology, therefore, the less expensive and more accessible that technology becomes, which makes for, as Hunt says, “a virtuous cycle of scale enabling scale.” Again, this is great news for corporate and public budgets, because the more we convert to solar technology, the less expensive it will be to maintain and replace in the long run.

The Additional Financial Benefits of Solar


In addition to the lower operating and maintenance costs associated with using solar LED bulbs, installation of street lighting systems also carries significant cost advantages. With no need to trench for electrical wires and no distribution costs, adding streetlights to a network becomes more financially viable.

That greater viability, coupled with solar street lighting’s independence of power outages and fluctuations, makes this technology worth exploring for Canada’s expanding urban areas, particularly in and around remote communities.

Want to learn about the many benefits of solar street lights? Check out our article The Importance of Solar Street Lights to Drivers and Pedestrians»

Feature image: Maria Carrasco; Image 1: Artem Kovalev

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