Can a lighting retrofit in a growing metropolitan city save energy, maintain safety standards, and protect the starry night sky?

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Tucson, Arizona, is a major metropolitan city in the southwest United States. The city has a long-standing commitment to best lighting practices that protect the night. In fact, people who move to the area often remark on how bright the stars appear to shine. But as the city has grown, so has its light pollution. With major astronomical observatories within close range, city leaders enacted an outdoor lighting ordinance in 2012 that requires fully shielded lighting and sets limits on the total light produced at night, especially in natural areas and areas close to astronomy sites.   

In 2016, Daryl Cole, the Director of Transportation for the city of Tucson, in consultation with IDA member, Christian Monrad, of Monrad Engineering, and Ameresco, a global energy management firm, developed a plan to convert nearly 20,000 street lights from high-pressure sodium to energy-efficient LEDs with adaptive controls. The plan projected savings of $180,000 per month in energy consumption and a sixty percent reduction in lumen output from street lighting. 

The conversion plan was approved by the Tucson city council in February 2016 and completed in 2018. In total, 19,561 fixtures were replaced with 3,000K LED lights. To prolong the life of the lights and reduce lumen output, the lights are operated at ninety percent capacity from the hours of sunset until midnight. After midnight, most of the lights are further reduced to sixty percent of capacity until they are extinguished thirty minutes after sunrise. 

Read more from the International Dark Sky Association here.