Philly to Retrofit All 100,000 City Streetlights

The city of Philadelphia has a great many plans to reduce its municipal energy consumption in the name of staving off climate change. These include ambitious but obvious initiatives like purchasing more renewable energy and driving more electric cars. But it turns out, when it comes to how much the city spends on its own energy bill, the single largest offender is something both ubiquitous and taken for granted: streetlights. Our roughly 100,000 sodium-powered bulbs cost $15 million to light each year. Which is why, after experimenting with some pilot programs beginning in 2011 that replaced 5,000 sodium bulbs with more energy-efficient LEDs the city has promised to scale up the whole effort and replace all of its 100,000 streetlights, along with another 18,000 alley lights.