Welcome to Ask Janet on Yukon Energy's blog

Dawson City Streetlight Usage | Monday, January 17, 2011

Question: I was wondering why the street lights are all on all the time at night in Dawson City? In other places I've lived they alternate the lamps every other one, turning them on and off during the night to conserve electricity and increase time between bulb changes.

In theory we could reduce the amount of light being used for street lighting in areas of lower traffic usage (or hours where usage is lower). However that adaptive lighting technology requires upgrades to the system (smart grid type technology) to allow centralized control of each streetlight. For our small number of lights in Dawson City it would not be cost effective right now.

Step 1 is to find the most energy efficient type of lighting (which is why we're looking at LEDs) and Step 2 would be to look at adaptive lighting technologies later on down the line. The type of LED streetlights we are testing do not have dimming capabilities but that is an option we can consider in the future. Prince George, B.C. is running a pilot adaptive lighting pilot project right now. Anchorage is also looking at dusk and dawn dimming and snowfall dimming (lights are brighter when reflecting off the snow). We will be following the results of their work to see how it might apply in Yukon.