Over the next 5 years the City of Los Angeles will be undergoing the largest LED street lighting retrofit project to date.  Working with the Clinton Climate Initiative's Outdoor Lighting Program, they will replace 140,000 incandescent, mercury vapor, metal halide and high pressure sodium lights with high efficiency LED lights.  The initiative will improve the light quality, reduce the city's energy consumption and save them money.  

They estimate the initiative will reduce the electricity the street lights consume by 40% and reduce carbon emissions by approximately 40,500 tons a year, which is the equivalent of taking 6,700 passenger vehicles off the road every year.

The city took a loan out to fund the project, however, they will be able to pay the loan off in seven years with the energy savings.  Once the loan is paid off they will continue to save $10 million a year.  

The CCI estimates that cities on average spend between 10 and 38 percent of their utility budgets on street lights.  They hope LA serves as a model for similar inititives in other US cities.  With nearly 35 million streetlights in the United States, "if every city followed the example of Los Angeles and reduced the electricity used by their streetlights by 50 percent, it would be equivalent to eliminating over 2.5 of those coal plants per year," President Clinton said. "We would do that while saving taxpayers money. And by doing that, we would also reclaim our night sky."

Source: Clinton Foundation