City of West Richland

Northwest Edison installed over 1,100 street lights throughout the city including ROAM Controls, an adaptive lighting controls system with utility-grade metering capabilities.  They are the first city in the nation that is being billed by the actual energy their lights are using, rather than a typical per fixture billing structure. For the city, now they aren’t paying for lights that aren’t operational. For the utility, this makes tracking the energy consumption much more accurate and, in turn, the city pays only for what they use. The adaptive lighting control is a valuable asset because they are able customize the city’s lighting needs.  For example, if they know the traffic in an area substantially decreases at 7:30 pm and doesn’t start back up until 4:30 am, they have the ability to dim the lighting for that decided timeframe.  This can lead to substantial savings.  One other technique that will be utilized is Constant Lumen Output (CLO). This means the fixtures maximum output is set to only maintain the light levels that the previous fixture performed, which typically, is well below the new LED’s capability. Let’s use an example of 75%.  Through the years, as the LED slowly starts to depreciate, the city can compensate for the depreciation by raising the maximum output.  In this example, use 1% per year, which is a very typical scenario. In doing this, the City has taken a fixture that originally had an expected life of 10 years and stretched it out to 25! Check out the video on our blog!