After: The 6th Street Bridge after high pressure sodium streetlights were replaced with LEDs (See end of post for a before photo).
(Credit: City of Los Angeles/Bureau of Street Lighting)Los Angeles is literally basking in a whole new glow.
The city has decided to replace its street lights and bus stop lighting with LEDs. The bus stop lighting will be solar-powered and off the grid.
LA's Bureau of Street Lighting has been actively testing out different types of energy efficient lighting to replace the public lighting that currently includes a combination of incandescent, mercury vapor, metal halide, and high pressure sodium lights.
In 2009, the agency began an LED street lighting energy efficiency program to actively replace its existing 209,000 streetlights. When complete, the city's energy consumption for public lighting should be cut by 40 percent and save 40,500 tons of carbon emissions per year, according to city statistics.
Now the city has decided on which specific lights to go with. Many of the street lamps will be LEDway streetlights from BetaLED. The solar-powered bus lamps are EverGen lights from Carmanah Technologies. Because the bus lights are self-sufficient, they will not need to be tied into the city's electric grid and will allow the city to remain lit even in the event of a blackout.
In a statement released Tuesday, Carmanah said its lights will also give the city more freedom to replace existing lights or introduce lights in new places without having to dig up sidewalks or tie into electricity poles, cutting down on installation costs.
But in addition to making the city more energy efficient, the switch from an abundance of high pressure sodium lights across the city's highways to LEDs is also drastically changing the city's look. Before and after photos provided by the city of the 6th Street Bridge over the Los Angeles River illustrate a clear change in tint from orange to whiter lighting.
Before: The orange glow of high pressure sodium lights on 6th Street Bridge over the Los Angeles River before they were replaced with LEDs.
(Credit: City of Los Angeles/Bureau of Street Lighting)Soon even more star power than usual will be absorbed by the Staples Center and Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles.
In an initiative to reduce the overall carbon footprint of the two venues, Solar Power Inc., or SPI, has been hired by AEG to install its line of photovoltaic solar-panel power systems on their roofs, beginning in October.
The Staples Center, which seats approximately 20,000, is home to the LA Lakers, LA Sparks, and LA Clippers basketball teams, the LA Kings hockey team and the LA Avengers arena football team, as well as host to concerts and events such as the Grammy Awards.
When installation is complete, approximately 24,196 feet of the Staples Center roof will be covered with 1,727 of SPI's photovoltaic modules, which include cells made by Motech Industries, adding up to a 345-kilowatt solar-power system.
The famous roof "surfboard," bearing the Staples logo, will not be removed, but rather will be incorporated into the new design, according to SPI.
The Nokia Theatre LA Live is a slightly smaller, 7,100-seat venue that has hosted the 2008 American Idol finals, the American Music Awards, the ESPY Awards, and numerous concerts. Approximately 836 photovoltaic modules will be installed, covering about 11,663 square feet of its roof and supplying a 167-kilowatt solar-power system.
"Our investment to purchase these state-of-the-art photovoltaic solar-energy systems for both Staples Center and Nokia Theater LA Live, making them the first facilities of their kind to do so at this level, reaffirms our commitment to ensuring that our venues are the most environmentally friendly in the industry," Zeidman said in a statement.
The solar installation can be added to the venues' list of "green efforts," which includes things like waterless urinals and energy-efficient fluorescent and LED lighting.
There is a 50 percent chance that Lake Mead, which was created by the Hoover Dam and the Colorado River, will go dry by 2021 because of escalating human demand and climate change, according to a study by Tim Barnett and David Pierce of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California at San Diego.
Lake Mead straddles the Arizona-Nevada border, and Lake Powell is on the Arizona-Utah border. Aqueducts carry water from the system to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, and other communities in the Southwest.
The old high water line is at the top of the white band. This was taken two weeks ago.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)By 2017, there is a 50 percent chance that the reservoir could drop so low that Hoover Dam could no longer produce hydroelectric power. Water conservation and mitigation technologies and policies thus need to be implemented now, the study stated.
The disappearance of the manmade lake would create a tidal wave of ill effects for the southwestern U.S. The lake provides water for large cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas, as well as for several agricultural interests. The power also keeps on the lights in that region of the country. Imagine Los Angeles on a summer day with sporadic air conditioning and only a trickle of water coming out of the faucet. Then imagine that goes for a week.
"We were stunned at the magnitude of the problem and how fast it was coming at us," Barnett said in a statement. "Make no mistake, this water problem is not a scientific abstraction, but rather one that will impact each and every one of us that live in the Southwest."
"Today, we are at or beyond the sustainable limit of the Colorado system," he added.
The level of the lake has been dropping for years. In the photo below, the white band marks the difference between the old high water level and the current one. It was taken two weeks ago. Barnett and Pierce estimated that there is a 10 percent chance that the lake could go dry as early as 2014. The full report will be published in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
Barnett and Pierce examined annual river flow averages for the past 100 years, evaporation rates, climate predictions, water allocation schedules, past water demand, and future projections, among other factors. Water allocation from the dam has been a political flash point for California, Nevada, and Arizona for years.
And the estimate is conservative, the scientists state. The study goes on the assumption that human-induced climate change factors only began in 2007.
Currently, the Colorado River system, which includes Lake Mead and nearby Lake Powell, is running a deficit of 1 million acre feet of water per year. An acre foot of water is the amount of water that it would take to cover an acre of land with a foot of water. It is enough water for 8 million people.
Other studies have forecast reductions of between 10 percent and 30 percent over the next 30 to 50 years in the Colorado River system. Such a decline could affect the water supply of between 12 million and 36 million people.
Venture capitalists, scientists, and others have said water will likely be one of the first manifestations of problems associated with climate change. China and Australia have already experienced droughts and agricultural problems. Several companies specializing in water management, purification, and desalination have received venture capital investments in recent years. Some companies to keep your eye on include NanoH20 (a desalination company), Vidler Water (a water rights broker) and Altela (artificial rain. No kidding.)
In some places, conservation strategies have been implemented. In Singapore, a small percentage of the country's water comes from the NEWater program, which takes human sewage water and makes it drinkable again. In Las Vegas, the water district offers residents money to remove lawns and replace them with desert landscaping. Still, implementing these technologies has moved slow in most places in the world.
Even if mitigation factors are put in place, the study warned that may not be enough to insulate the Southwest from problems associated with droughts.
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