Washington, DC--The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that Seattle City Light (Seattle, WA), a public utility providing electrical energy to Seattle and surrounding areas, was selected to lead a national effort to guide municipalities in evaluating light-emitting diode (LED) street lights. Edward Smalley of Seattle City Light will lead the Municipal Solid-State Street Lighting Consortium, which will collect, analyze, and share information and lessons learned related to LED street lighting demonstrations.
Interest in LED lighting is growing rapidly across the country, fueled in part by cities looking to use American Recovery and Reinvestment Act/Block Grant funding to replace existing street lighting with energy-efficient LEDs.
Starting today, cities and power providers and others who invest in street and area lighting are invited to join the Consortium and share their experiences through national and regional meetings, webcasts, web-based discussion forums, and other means. The goal is to build a repository of valuable field experience and data that will significantly accelerate the learning curve for buying and implementing high quality, energy-efficient LED street lights. The DOE Consortium efforts are funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
To learn more about the Consortium and membership, visit www.ssl.energy.gov/consortium.html.
Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)
Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.