In Febuary , Los Angeles will meet its four-year anniversary of the world’s most ambitious LED street light conversion project, as  Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and President Bill Clinton announced  a partnership On February 16, 2009 under which the city, advised by the Clinton Climate Initiative, would outfit 140,000 street lights with LED fixtures.

The City of Los Angeles owns and operates the nation’s second-largest street lighting system: 210,000 street lights (including 70,000 decorative street lamps that will be retrofitted in a second phase) anchored along 4,500 miles of illuminated streets.

The scope of the Los Angeles undertaking, combined with results recorded from the tens of thousands of LED units already deployed, should hasten other cities move to LEDs. Street lighting can account for up to 40% of a city’s electricity bill, according to Pike Research.

On January 23, the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting published an update  on the status of the LED conversion project. The results: 114,067 units replaced, $5,325,793 in annual electricity savings, and 63.3% electricity savings over the incumbent high-pressure sodium street lights.

The anniversary is a good time to take a closer look at the results and lessons learned, with more than 80% of the LED fixtures planned for phase one deployed. The lessons learned are based on a presentation delivered by Ed Ebrahimian, Director, Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting, to the IES Street and Area Lighting Conference convened in Miami in September 2012.

Los Angeles is testing and evaluating LED and induction units to deploy in phase two of the street lighting conversion, when the city will replace fixtures in 70,000 decorative street lamps.