Ottawa Converting 58,000 Streetlights to LED

September 1, 2016

An LED streetlight conversion that began in July and will continue until June 2020 is expected to reduce energy usage by 55% and save the City of Ottawa $4 million annually — equivalent to removing 2,500 homes from the electricity grid.

Project partners involved in designing, manufacturing and installing the lighting include Energy Ottawa, a subsidiary of Hydro Ottawa Holding Inc. that provides commercial energy management services, Black & McDonald, LED Roadway Lighting, Eaton Cooper Lighting and Leotek Electronics. 

The installations will be phased in:

• 4,000 in 2016

• 15,000 in each of 2017, 2018 and 2019

• 9,000 in 2020

Key features and enhancements include the following:

• nodes and network — each LED streetlight has its own wireless communication node and IP address fully-connected to a wireless network. These nodes also allow for tracking each streetlight individually. All streetlight nodes are also connected to one another, communicating and distributing data within the network.

• customized illumination — Energy Ottawa will engineer the LED conversion to optimize illumination levels for each street. Every LED light fixture can be individually controlled.

• instant performance reporting — previously, City of Ottawa residents or night surveyors would have to report faulty streetlights and outages. But through the new wireless network, each streetlight sends regular reports to Energy Ottawa regarding its condition, performance and energy usage. As a result, once notified that a streetlight isn’t functioning properly, a maintenance crew an be dispatched to fix the issue.

• future smart city functionality — the system creates a platform for Smart City initiatives in the future.

• warm colour temperature (3000K) LED luminaires for residential areas. These new LEDs are “full cut-off” and have better optical control, meaning they help reduce the amount of light pollution and light trespass.

The City of Ottawa currently has over 68,000 streetlights made up of either high pressure sodium (HPS) or metal halide (MH) fixtures, accounting for 17% of the city’s electrical use, and cost $7.2 million in annual electricity costs. Streetlight fixtures with the highest energy consumption or highest wattage are the first to be converted to LED. Decorative light fixtures will not be converted as a part of the project as these are low wattage and therefore do not consume significant amounts of energy. 

Photo source: Energy Ottawa.