Let there be lights.
That was the welcome message delivered last year by Mayor Bob Buckhorn to a smiling group assembled outside the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church in East Tampa.
Flanked by representatives from Tampa Electric Company — the city’s sole power company and one of the most powerful corporations in the Bay area — the mayor announced that 8,400 new streetlights would be installed by TECO at a cost to the city of $2.2 million over the next five years in areas where they are most needed, particularly East Tampa, Ybor City and Sulphur Springs.
Councilman Frank Reddick, who represents a good portion of those areas, says streetlight improvements have been among his constituents’ top concerns — especially since the incident a year ago when a pregnant 27-year-old woman named Monica Alvarez was struck and killed by a motorist as she and a friend were pushing their babies in strollers down a darkened street, a street where TECO soon installed a streetlight.
But some critics are questioning why a city led by a mayor and City Council who pride themselves on being all about sustainability are opting to light up the city with antiquated lighting technology — technology that local environmentalist Susan Glickman calls the equivalent of an 8-track cassette tape.
A better, more efficient alternative, says Glickman, would be to use LED, or light-emitting diode, technology. But Tampa and other Florida cities remain in the dark ages where lighting innovation is concerned — at least for now.
Most streetlights are owned by local utilities: TECO in Tampa and Progress Energy in St. Petersburg and Clearwater (Progress has merged with North Carolina-based Duke Energy and will soon change its name). The cities pay the utilities for the cost of installation and the electricity used.
So if Tampa wants its new lights to be LEDs, the city needs to get TECO to agree. But Tampa Electric has until recently been uninterested in providing such lights. Too expensive, TECO has claimed, so the utility has not even taken the necessary first step — applying to the Public Service Commission in Tallahassee to get a tariff, or an approved rate, for LED lights.
So what’s so special about LEDs?
Conventional lighting (which in Tampa means light bulbs made of high-pressure sodium and metal halide) tends to decay in quality over time and have a shorter life when dimmed.
Light-emitting diode technology not only uses less energy than conventional methods, it also provides highly directional light, shining only on the spot that needs illumination, reducing light pollution.
According to a report called Lighting the Clean Revolution by The Climate Group, energy savings from LED technologies range between 50-70 percent compared with conventional alternatives. LEDs are also better for the environment. Their only major negative right now is the up-front costs. But prices have been dropping in the past few years, and advocates say whatever funds are expended up front are more than made up for on the back end.
And quality of light can have a direct influence on quality of life, improving both a city’s aesthetics and safety levels. In before-and-after photos taken of roadways around the country, the changes wrought by LED illumination seem almost literally like night and day. In Baltimore, where some 80,000 streetlights are being retrofitted to LEDs, City Councilman Robert Curran says, “When you compare these two types of lighting directly, the difference is stark.”
Los Angeles, which unlike Tampa or St. Petersburg owns its public utility, is using direct borrowing to finance the largest LED street lighting project in the U.S., retrofitting 140,000 lights. When the plan was announced in February of 2009, it was estimated that once the lights are fully converted in 2014, the city will save a minimum of 40 percent on lighting costs and reduce carbon emissions by approximately 40,500 tons a year. The city has reported a 10.5 percent reduction in crime incidents between 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. since LED lights were installed.
Seattle has also been a trendsetter, working since 2007 to convert all 41,000 of its streetlights to LED by 2014. And in Charlotte, a city with which Tampa frequently likes to compare itself, the City Council has approved $179,000 for the purchase and installation of LED streetlights. The city made an upfront single payment to Duke Energy, which said in return it would cut the city’s monthly fee for those lights by $7.50 a pole.
St. Petersburg City Councilman Karl Nurse wants his city to jump on the LED bandwagon.
At an energy summit hosted by Agriculture Secretary Adam Putnam at St. Petersburg College’s Seminole campus in August, Nurse told Putnam the state could save millions of dollars annually through the conversion to LED streetlights.
He followed up in a letter to Patrick Sheehan, director of the Florida Energy Office, which is under the aegis of Agriculture. Nurse also advised the city’s St. Public Works Administrator, Mike Connors, to contact officials there.
Reached later by CL, Sheehan was circumspect: “It’s our anticipation that we’ll have a healthy discussion about the robust study of all aspects of FEECA which will cover issues like this that Councilman Nurse has raised.”
FEECA stands for the Florida Energy Efficiency and Conservation Act, enacted by the Legislature in 1980 to make sure that all of the investor-owned utilities in the state are working toward reducing energy demand and consumption. Earlier this year the Legislature called on Putnam’s department and the PSC to review how FEECA is holding up.
The city of St. Pete has done its homework regarding LED pricing, and officials are not pleased about how unaccommodating the state has been in opening up that market.
Unlike TECO, Progress Energy has offered tariffs since 2010 — but they’re so expensive that no local government has been able to take advantage of them. Connors tells CL that the tariff is for a higher-wattage LED than is necessary. He says Progress is offering prices for 100- or 150-watt LEDS, when only 75 watts is needed for most city sidewalks.
“It’s like $21, $22 a month, which is ridiculous,” he says, referring to the monthly charge per fixture rate. “In the Carolinas, it’s between $6 and $7 a month.”
The fact that TECO still doesn’t offer an LED tariff irks Tampa activists like attorney Spencer Kass. During the year-long debate about re-signing TECO’s franchise fee agreement in 2008, he challenged the Iorio administration to request such a tariff.
Kass contends that at one point, Darrell Smith, Mayor Iorio’s chief of staff, said that the issue could be negotiated after the franchise agreement. “What kind of stupid BS is that?” Kass says. “You don’t say you’re going to negotiate part of the contract after you give them the contract signed. Who negotiates like that?”
Another neighborhood activist, Randy Baron, agrees. He said it was the “mantra” of the administration to “get this thing signed and we’ll deal with all the details afterwards.” He adds that “Darrell specifically mentioned LED lighting.”
The reason that’s significant is that the city is now locked into a franchise agreement for another 21 years with TECO, meaning their leverage with the power company is minuscule.
Former Mayor Iorio told CL she couldn’t recall all of the negotiated points in the franchise agreement.
In any event, Kass says that if the city wanted to, it could bypass TECO and purchase the streetlights itself. But would it?
Susan Glickman of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy says the problem with investor-owned utilities like TECO and Progress is that “they fundamentally don’t want to sell us less electricity.”
But in recent weeks it appears that TECO has changed its tune. Company spokesperson Cheri Jacobs told CL last week that, within the next few months, the company will apply for an LED tariff from the PSC.
Why now? Because, she explained, the technology has improved and the price has come down. But she adds that the technology still has its financial drawbacks. “The downside of LEDs are that they are very expensive on the front end. They’re cheaper to run on a day-to-day basis, but they’re more expensive to buy and install, so over the course of that streetlight, a town might not be saving any more money.”
But consumer advocates say that’s absolutely not correct, that the savings come in just a few years when you add in the fact that you don’t need to replace them so quickly.
Some critics blame the state’s Public Service Commission for not pushing for more energy efficiencies. Karl Nurse says that the PSC is a “subsidiary of the power companies.”
He and other environmentalists say that there’s little incentive for the power companies in Florida to offer up LEDs at a competitive price, since they won’t make as much money. This is where the argument for decoupling comes into play, the idea that you decouple energy rates from profits.
Currently 17 states in the country have decoupling laws. Lowell Ungar, the director of policy for the Washington, D.C.-based Alliance to Save Energy, says that in states like Florida there is a “perverse incentive” for utilities to sell more electricity to customers, whereas it’s generally more beneficial for energy consumers (all of us citizens) to use less.
This is how decoupling works, he explains: A state’s public utility commission determines how much money a utility needs to provide the necessary services (transmission lines, call centers and the like), tries to determine how much electricity the utilities will sell, then divides that to come up with the appropriate rates.
Decoupling originated in California in the 1970s, when it became apparent that it was cheaper to reduce electricity usage than to make more electricity.
Whether the state’s PSC will start acting in the public’s favor is seriously questioned. Last week the agency approved another $292 million in charges to Progress and Florida Power & Light customers for their nuclear power projects, some of which may never see the light of day, leading the Tampa Bay Times editorial page to describe the PSC as “outlandish,” “ indefensible” and “outrageous,” all in the same editorial.
Tampa Public Works Administrator Mike Herr says that the city is working with community redevelopment managers as well as the Tampa Police Department to determine where the first group of streetlights will be installed. The city will spend $450,000 per year to TECO through 2017 for those lights.
Lowell Ungar says Tampa should ask some pointed questions before it makes such a purchase. “What are the energy efficiencies of those [conventional] lights? And whether they’re locking themselves into paying for more electricity than they need to on a continuing cost.”
So the question comes back to: Would the city spend the money on LEDs instead?
Tampa's transportation manager, Jean Duncan, told CL late last Friday afternoon that the city was “definitely very pleased that TECO is moving us in that direction.”
When asked if that means the city will purchase LEDs when TECO has a tariff, she said her staff looks forward to that approval so they can start “crunching the numbers” to see if it’s viable for the city to go forward.
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2012.