Osram's LEDs light up Canadian sidewalks

12 Nov 2007

LEDs are lighting the streets of Banff in Canada as part of a pilot project with Osram.

LED street lighting

Osram has joined forces with the Canadian town of Banff in a project to convert its street lighting to LEDs. Osram hopes that the knowledge gained from this scheme will speed up the uptake of LED lighting.

"For the first time we are able to observe the use of LEDs in a day-to-day situation virtually under the laboratory conditions of a small town," said Rüdiger Müller, CEO at Osram Opto Semiconductors. "We expect LEDs to become more and more popular in the medium term for street lighting."

To date, eight streetlights have been upgraded to LEDs, which has reduced the energy consumption by 36 %, and more streetlights will follow. "This project gives us an immediate insight into the ecological and economic effects of our LEDs on the community," said Müller.

One of the major challenges for the Osram engineers was designing a lens that directs the light from the LED down onto the street and not into the surroundings or sky. The changeover increases the lifetime of the streetlights from 15,000 hours to up to 50,000 hours using LEDs. This reduces maintenance costs, electricity consumption and CO₂ emissions.