Economic Evaluation of Environment-Friendly Streetlights on a University Campus: Using a Field Survey in Korea

Nowadays, most illumination sources for streetlights use high intensity discharge (HID) lamps. Global concerns have been raised regarding the amount of atmospheric CO2 released due to the power consumption of HID lamps. Thus streetlights with LED and solar-energy were analyzed competitively, to evaluate the feasibility of streetlights based on environmentally-friendly products at K University. The results showed that the adoption of a LED based streetlight system and a solar-energy LED system could potentially reduce CO2 emissions by approximately 120 and 170 tons each year, respectively. While the initial investment cost of LED is higher than HID, the maintenance cost is approximately one quarter of the maintenance cost of HID. However solar-energy LED lights are not appropriate to replace campus lights because of the significantly higher cost. Since the invention of LED, the technology has been continually improving while the prices are quickly decreasing; therefore, the break-even point of investments in environmentally-friendly lights is expected to be reached much earlier than previously anticipated.