Situated in Connecticut, U.S, and home to a population of 60,000 people, Meriden will be replacing its sodium bulb streetlights with LEDs through a citywide upgrade, reported myrecordjournal.

Upgrading 4,200 streetlights with LED bulbs will help the city save US $9 million over the next two decades.

The $2.5 million project includes procuring LED bulbs from Eversource Energy that will be installed in city-owned utility poles, said Stephen Montemurro, the city information technology director.

Streetlight installations started in Nov. 7, 2016 will take one whole year to complete, with certain work continuing into early January.

The new LED bulbs have an estimated lifetime of 20 years or are made to last 120,000 hours, said Montemurro. This is about 10 times the lifetime of high pressure sodium bulbs that burn out after two or three years.

The city shelled out US $1.07 million to acquire 4,267 lights from Eversource and is paying a contractor US $1.3 million to install the lights.

The city is starting to benefit from energy savings through the purchase of the lights, Montemurro said. The city paid US $63,292 to power streetlights in October 2015, but the cost was slashed 49% to US $32,550 for October 2016.

“When the city purchased their own street lights (Eversource’s) rates changed,” Montemurro said. “There’s an immediate savings just from purchasing your own lights. Of course, we have to assume the maintenance on those lights as well.”

Installation of the LED streetlights will drive down energy consumption from the streetlights by 68% and will help the city save an estimated US $300,000 by the end of 2016 and about US $550,000.

Energy savings from the first five years will be used to pay the US $2.5 million capital cost of the project, while the 20-years savings is estimated to reach US $9 million.