Northern lights: Count Anchorage among one of the latest LED cities
The city of Anchorage in Alaska, notoriously gloomy in the winter months, will spend approximately $2.2 million to retrofit 16,000 municipal roadway lights (about one-quarter of all streetlights) with LED fixtures.
The deal is one of the latest projects to emerge from the LED City program, which is advocated by Cree, an LED manufacturer in Durham, N.C.
Anchorage will make an interesting test case for the LED technology, since there are approximately 85 days there every year when there are less than eight hours of daylight. The fixtures that will be installed there are from BetaLED, and they could save about $360,000 per year in energy costs.
Other LED City cities are Toronto, Austin, Raleigh, N.C.; Ann Arbor, Mich., Tianjin, China; and Torraca, Italy.