Michigan city slashes energy costs by 50 percent with LED streetlights
Corunna, Mich., has retrofitted a number of its downtown streetlights, and in the process, chopped electricity bills in half. Crews replaced 175-watt metal halide streetlights with 48-watt LEDs from Sarasota, Fla.-based EvoLucia, Inc.
“The current tracking of our electric bills shows that our electric wattage consumption has been cut in half,” said Corunna City Planner Merilee Lawson. “In fact, we received a letter from Consumers Energy last month declaring us to justify why our electric usage had dropped so drastically. Current electric bills are showing a wattage usage reduction of more than 50 percent.”
Corunna’s downtown LED retrofit project was made possible by two grants from the Michigan Department of Energy, Labor and Economic Growth that totaled $100,000. The city’s 2009 population was 3,260.
The city installed the EvoLucia PTR Retrofit Kit, a “plug-and-play” LED retrofit product that allows for one-for-one direct replacement using existing poles. Crews from Corunna’s Department of Public Works removed the existing globes, replaced the HID lamps with the EvoLucia LED kits, and replaced the globes.
The simple retrofit process is a money-saver, said EvoLucia sales representative Mike Bay of Franklin, Mich.-based Baylume, Inc., which was awarded the contract for the retrofit project. “The city of Corunna loved the EvoLucia retrofit kit because it really is as simple as changing out a light bulb, but less than half the cost of changing out the entire fixture,” said Bay. “The fact that they were able to use their existing poles meant that they could stretch their grant money further and retrofit twice the number of lights they originally thought they could.”
EvoLucia sells complete commercial-grade LED fixtures for outdoor applications, such as parking lots and garages, streets and highways, landscaping and architectural lighting. The company’s Aimed LED lights employ Aimed Optics technology, which saves energy while strategically directing light to the target area.
