Falls sees 5.1% reduction in streetlight costs

Niagrafallsreview.ca
Jan. 16, 2018
Ray Spiteri

The City of Niagara Falls has seen a 5.1 per cent reduction in costs after replacing just under 8,400 streetlights with LED fixtures in 2016.

Finance director Todd Harrison said the municipality has saved about $50,000 a year in streetlight costs since the $3.9-million project was implemented.

The city borrowed $1.4 million to help pay for the project. The municipality was also successful in getting $840,000 from an LED subsidy program, while revenue Niagara Falls receives from Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. for hosting two casinos was also used.

“The cost savings was a little bit higher, but due to the increases in cost in the hydro market, we’ve not seen as high as what had really been anticipated in the original report,” said Harrison.

“But it’s still savings and cost avoidance. We’ve also reduced our energy consumption.”

Harrison said he doesn’t have specific details about what the city’s energy consumption savings is because he doesn’t have a full year to compare it against.

“The lights were partially completed in 2016, so I don’t really have an annual (figure), and then there’s been some changes to the streetlighting (program),” he said.

“We’ve done a streetlight conversion of the Victoria Avenue BIA area, and then we’ve got new items that are coming in … so it’s difficult to compare year to year. But it’s pretty safe to say that this is a good-news story in that we’ve saved approximately $50,000 — approximately five per cent of the original cost, and we have a decrease in consumption, and we’ve avoided future cost increases, which is really the important thing.”

Harrison said energy costs have increased, and will continue to increase in the future.

“We will avoid costs that otherwise would have been incurred.”

In 2015, council approved a staff recommendation giving the project contract to RealTerm Energy, which provides turnkey services for LED streetlight projects that include everything from design to selection of the installation company, along with doing the audit at the end of the process.

RealTerm, which has carried out similar work for other municipalities and supplied the fixtures and mapping, hired Niagara Falls utility company Ground Aerial Maintenance to replace the city’s older high-pressure sodium streetlights with 8,370 LED (light-emitting diode) lights.

City staff originally said the project would decrease energy demand by 31 per cent.

GAMS, a long-time utility and line services company, was also responsible for the streetlight conversion in Niagara Falls in the mid 1980s from fluorescent to the orange high-pressure sodium lights.