Skip to main content

Cities to invest $64 billion in LED and smart streetlights by 2025

A new study by the Northeast Group says there are currently more than 2,000 LED and smart streetlight projects globally. With these infrastructure projects, cities and municipalities across the world modernise their streetlights with more efficient light-emitting diode (LED) lights. They are also deploying sensors, communications and analytics software throughout their street lighting infrastructure and creating smart cities. This is a key segment of the emerging Internet of Things. Rapidly falling costs an
April 28, 2015 Read time: 2 mins
A new study by the Northeast Group says there are currently more than 2,000 LED and smart streetlight projects globally. With these infrastructure projects, cities and municipalities across the world modernise their streetlights with more efficient light-emitting diode (LED) lights. They are also deploying sensors, communications and analytics software throughout their street lighting infrastructure and creating smart cities. This is a key segment of the emerging Internet of Things. Rapidly falling costs and clear benefits have led to a sharp increase in the number and scale of LED and smart streetlight projects in the past year, according to the study.

"With LEDs approaching cost parity with legacy streetlights, their energy and maintenance savings make the business case a no-brainer. By 2025, LED and smart streetlights around the world will save 97,900 GWh annually, the equivalent of US$12.9 billion in electricity costs per year. Smart street lighting will also pave the way for additional smart city applications such as smart parking meters, environmental sensors and video monitoring," said Ben Gardner, president of Northeast Group.

Of the more than 2,000 current LED and smart streetlight projects across 90 countries, Northeast Group analysed more than 800 projects and found that cities are now undertaking larger-sized deployments. In just the past year, Madrid began the largest single-city project with 225,000 streetlights, Los Angeles announced it would network the 140,000 LED streetlights it recently deployed and the utility Florida Power & Light set plans to network 500,000 streetlights.

As deployments accelerate globally, diverse vendors are all competing for a piece of the growing market. Increasingly, partnerships between vendors across the value chain provide complete smart city solutions. Acuity, 852 Bridgelux, 1947 Cooper, Cree, Echelon, Elster, 940 GE, Itron, 1786 Osram, 5147 Philips, Schreder, Sensus, Silver Spring Networks and 5392 Toshiba are among the major vendors in the market.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Lidar: beginning to see the light
    March 14, 2022
    Lidar feels like a technology whose time has come – but why now? Adam Hill talks to manufacturers, vendors and system integrators in the sector to assess the state of play and to find out what comes next
  • MaaS will be adopted quicker in Europe than in the US: here’s why
    December 5, 2018
    A new report suggests that MaaS will be implemented more quickly in Europe than in the US – but why should this be? Ben Spencer examines the arguments
  • Inrix identifies the worst traffic hotspots in the 25 most congested US cities
    September 28, 2017
    Inrix has published its latest research on the worst traffic hotspots in America. Using Inrix Roadway Analytics, a cloud-based traffic analysis tool, Inrix analysed and ranked more than 100,000 traffic hotspots in the 25 most congested US cities. The economic cost of hotspots was also calculated in terms of wasted time, lost fuel and carbon emissions over the next decade. The research identified and ranked 108,000 traffic hotspots in the 25 most congested cities in the US identified by the INRIX Global T
  • Building the case for photo enforcement
    October 26, 2016
    As red light enforcement is returning to some intersections and being shut down at others, new evidence has been released backing the safety campaigners, reports Jon Masters. In 2014, 709 Americans were killed in red-light-running crashes and an estimated 126,000 were injured according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).