The Light Thing

In December, Councilman Bill Peduto introduced a plan to upgrade all of Pittsburgh 40,000 street lights to more energy efficient models. Here's an update on the street light progress. The councilor's office let me know that the street lights are in their testing phases.

"The streetlight initiative test phase is ongoing. Lights were installed throughout the South Side in the last month. We installed lights from more than 45 different responses to the City's test phase request. We have experts from Pitt, Carnegie Mellon, and Penn State working on this project, monitoring the lights that were installed, writing a new lighting code, etc."

And the competition is fierce. Whoever wins this lighting battle gets a very lucrative $25 Million contract and some major press.

Here are 2 of the 45:

• Imbutech: Already installed LED lighting at the Allegheny County jail and is bidding for the city wide job.
  
• Orion: A flourescent lighting company out of Wisconsin performed well. "[T]he Orion fixtures reduced energy consumption 65% while boosting light output by an average of 300%, compared with the city's existing street lights."
  

You've got to admit the city's come along ways since the days when the street lights used to shine all day to cut through the smoke.