Trail streetlight project recognized at city council meeting
By Contributor
Last week, Doug Lamminen, technical advisor from FortisBC’s Conservation and Energy Management team, presented council with a cheque for $44,660 to complete the second phase of its street lighting upgrade project.
This summer, the City of Trail will complete the second phase of a project to upgrade more than 1,000 street lights to LED. Switching to LEDs reduces each streetlight’s energy consumption by half, and Trail is going a step further by installing smart lighting technology that dims slightly as the night progresses to achieve even greater savings.
As a result of this upgrade, Trail is expected to reduce energy use by about 500,000 kilowatt hours annually – or the equivalent of powering 44 average homes for a year. This is expected to produce annual saving of $93,000 overall and has earned Trail $67,000 in rebates from FortisBC.
Trail is one of the many communities across the Okanagan and the Kootenays that have made street lighting an energy-saving priority. Over the last three years, FortisBC has helped reduce the energy used by streetlights by 1.5 million kilowatt hours. This project, together with other pending projects, will quadruple these savings by 2020, bringing the total expected energy savings to 6.3 million kilowatt hours annually, or the equivalent of powering more than 430 average homes annually.
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