Incandescent lights may disappear and LEDs will play a key role in this year's Festival of Lights at the VanDusen Botanical Garden.

According to Van-Dusen spokeswoman Nancy Wong,"About eight years ago, the Festival of Lights used 25,000 incandescent lights. Now we have close to 1.4 million [lights] and 85 to 90 per cent of them are LED.The 1.4 million use the same amount of power as the incandescents did because the LEDs use 95-per-cent less power."

The annual display, spread over 4.8 hectares (11.8 acres), helped lead the provincewide trend toward LED holiday lights when it received about 60,000 lights as part of a BC Hydro pilot project in December 2002.

Under its  Power Smart conservation program,BC Hydro, gave the new lights to Van-Dusen and business improvement associations throughout B.C., which passed them on to retailers to test drive before they hit the market the following year. Soon the city was abuzz with talk of the beautiful new lights.

Beginning in 2003, Power Smart incentivized switching to the new lights with coupon rebates for new LED strings in exchange for any incandescent strings that were traded in. That year, more than 450,000 LED light strings were sold across the province.

Fast forward to 2011 and Mathot said Power Smart has toned down its efforts at promoting the lights, partly because 45 per cent of B.C. families have at least one LED Christmas light strand. Of those families, most own an average of about six strands each, Mathot said.