New Consortium for LED Street Lights

Is your utility or municipality investigating LED street and area lighting products or conducting a demonstration project or full scale retrofit?

Popular before ARRA funding opportunities, many more municipalities are now pursuing the installation of LED street lights with their Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant funds.

Because these applications of LED lighting are relatively new and many of these projects are taking place simultaneously, the Department of Energy (DOE) formed the Municipal Solid-State Street Lighting Consortium earlier this year to accelerate the learning curve and help cities and utilities take advantage of successful strategies/avoid duplication of lessons learned by others. The Municipal Consortium will collect, analyze, and share technical information and the experiences of its members, so that a larger body of knowledge related to this topic is accessible to others pursuing these initiatives.

Membership in the Consortium is open to municipalities, utilities, and energy efficiency organizations, with participation at various levels from other interested parties.

• Primary members include municipalities, power providers, building owners, and other decisionmakers who invest in street and area lighting.
• Advisory members are solicited from organizations with a known history for promoting quality lighting and energy efficiency (e.g. educational institutions, environmental monitoring agencies, etc.) and will be selected to fill specific Consortium needs.
• Guests include individual employees of organizations that meet the requirements for membership but whose organizations have chosen not to join.

To date, the Consortium has received over 400 applications for membership with 229 coming from utilities/municipalities. Information on joining is available here.

The Consortium will disseminate best practices and lessons learned through national and regional meetings, webcasts, web-based discussion forums, and other means. The first webcast, on May 6, 2010, presented information on the Consortium's purpose, first steps, and opportunities to participate. A second webcast, on July 20, 2010, provided an update on Consortium activities and perspectives from members who are in the midst of implementing LED street lighting evaluations.

The group is now planning for the first of what it expects will be an annual Municipal Solid-State Conference. It will be held on September 29, 2010 from 2:00pm to 5:00pm, after the Street and Area Lighting Conference at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Hotel. This event is open to all, except manufacturers, vendors, distributors, and their representatives at this time. Seating is limited with priority reservations going to municipalities and utilities. Those interested in attending should contact Vicki Marsten at Seattle City Light as soon as possible (email: MSSLC@Seattle.Gov; phone: (206) 386-1783).

More information about Solid State Lighting in general can be found on DOE's SSL resource pages.