SF replacing streetlights with brighter, energy-efficient LEDs

LED street light on Harrison Street in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, June 19, 2017. LED street light on Harrison Street in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, June 19, 2017. Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close SF replacing streetlights with brighter, energy-efficient LEDs 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Large strips of San Francisco streets will soon be bathed in the warm, white light produced by 12,500 new streetlights that the city’s Public Utilities Commission is planning to install by the end of this year.

As part of a concerted push by San Francisco to refurbish and modernize the city’s infrastructure, the PUC is replacing outdated street lamp heads with brighter, more energy-efficient light-emitting diode fixtures.

The new lights are expected to improve visibility on the city’s streets, enhancing safety for motorists and pedestrians, while sharply curbing electricity usage and maintenance costs.

“Better light, lower maintenance costs and more energy efficient — the business case for our LED streetlight conversion project could not be clearer,” said PUC General Manager Harlan Kelly in announcing the initiative.

The city has installed about 7,000 LED fixtures over the past five years, making the PUC’s push to more than double that figure by the end of the year by far the largest LED streetlight upgrade to date.

The PUC is responsible for about 25,500 streetlights, about 60 percent of all streetlights in the city. The remaining 40 percent are mainly owned and operated by PG&E. The city is also separately working on a plan to modernize the roughly 5,500 street lights, including ornamental and antique fixtures, that aren’t part of the LED replacement plan.

The fixtures being replaced, known as high-pressure sodium lights, have been used extensively to brighten city streets nationwide since they were developed in the 1970s, and they tend to give off a duller, yellowish glow. Cities across the country, including San Jose, San Diego, Los Angeles and Phoenix, have taken up similar measures to switch out their existing street lights for LED fixtures.

At a cost of $200 each, the streetlight replacement project will cost the city around $2.5 million, according to PUC spokesman Charles Sheehan. But those costs will be offset, he said, within four years thanks to energy savings.

The SFPUC estimates that the lights will save San Francisco more than $983,000 annually compared with the high-pressure sodium fixtures, which use more energy and tend to burn out within three to five years. The PUC calls the LED fixtures “virtually maintenance-free for up to 20 years.” The LEDs are also expected to save enough energy each year to power 752 homes.

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee said through a spokeswoman, “It’s not every day that the city can improve public safety, save money and move us closer to our environmental goals in one fell swoop.”

Each light will take less than 30 minutes to replace, and no street closures are expected in connection with the project. The PUC will need to replace only the “heads” of the streetlights, and will leave the existing lamp post poles and arms untouched. Sheehan added that the PUC was also actively experimenting with technology that would allow for the lights to be remotely controlled and monitored.

Beyond cost and energy savings, LED streetlights also significantly increase visibility, said Nancy Clanton, who operates a lighting engineering and design firm in Boulder, Colo. In conjunction with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, Clanton conducted visibility tests comparing how well drivers could see at night using high-pressure sodium or LED lights.

“We’ve found that the high-pressure sodium is such a big loser in this whole game that you can get by with half or almost a third of the wattage of LED lights and have greater visibility at a much further distance,” Clanton said.

Clanton also pointed out that the technical specifications of the lights the PUC will be installing are also in line with the types of fixtures recommended by the American Medical Association.

Last year, recognizing the widening adoption of LED streetlights across the country, the AMA released guidance advising communities to adopt fixtures that emit a minimal amount of harsh “blue-rich” light, which the organization said can disrupt people’s sleeping patterns.

Dominic Fracassa is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dominicfracassa