BAGUIO City has replaced nearly half of its streetlights with more cost-effective and efficient light-emitting diode (LED) lights to date as ongoing efforts seek to fully convert the city’s light network by the end of the year.
According to Engr. Richard Molina from the City Engineering Office, the city has replaced 42 percent or 3,145 of its 7,485 existing streetlights in the city with LEDs, which are cheaper, brighter, and overall more cost-effective.
“This is our switch to more efficient lighting. Our objective is to reduce our electric consumption for road lighting by fifty percent,” Molina said.
Based on data from the year 2020, the city’s 7,485 streetlights, 94 percent of which are spread across the city’s 128 barangays, cost Baguio some 529,000 kilowatt-hours worth of electricity.
With the city’s average rates of P7.20 per kilowatt-hour, the average monthly bill of the city for lighting its various roads and streets amounts to P3.8 million, P3.5 million of which is spread throughout the city’s barangays.
However, with 78 of the city’s 128 barangays having been switched to LED lighting, Molina expects a marked drop in the city’s power bills, which would only improve as the city completes more of the replacements.
The project, initially pegged by the city at a cost of P134 million, is now being handled by a Parañaque-based company that bid for the project at P112 million.
Molina said that in addition to cutting electricity bills by half, the LED lights are superior in many ways to the conventional lighting fixtures utilized by the city.
“We used to use high-pressure sodium lights that consume large amounts of electricity, and the light quality is not that good, the yellow. And, the lifespan of such lighting is only two years,” Molina said.
In comparison, the LED lights being used by the city for replacement lasts for ten years, with a warranty for free replacement for the first five years.
He added that LED lights also will incur fewer maintenance costs compared to the older lighting fixtures used by the city and thus will require less upkeep.
