Region: Latin America and Caribbean
Country: Mexico
Sector: Energy and Power
Keywords: Energy and Power
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Guadalajara, with a population of approximately 1.5 million, is the fourth largest city in Mexico and is located in the country’s central Pacific region. Until the implementation of the current street lighting retrofit project, the city’s outdated street lighting infrastructure had not been renovated in over 30 years. Lighting crews could not keep up with outages reported by citizens, and there were many unlit areas around the city. This coincided with increasing crime rates, leading to an overall lack of safety in the city. The outdated infrastructure also required substantial spending on both maintenance and electricity for the street lights. Street lighting represented approximately 18 percent of electricity consumption, and paying for it was a significant component of the city’s budget. 1 To help Guadalajara and other cities address the problem, Mexico’s national government established National Project for Energy Efficiency and Public Municipal Lighting (Proyecto Nacional de Eficiencia Energética en Alumbrado Público Municipal2 (PNEEAPM - National Public Lighting Program.) The program provides a significant amount of technical assistance to cities embarking on LED public lighting projects. The cities also have an opportunity to obtain financing from the National Bank of Public Works and Services (Banco Nacional de Obras y Servicios Publicos, or Banobras) and to obtain rebates after verifying the energy savings from the investment. The technical assistance reduces the risk that municipalities associate with embarking on an LED street lighting project, and the rebate provides an additional incentive to retrofit outdated street lighting infrastructure. Guadalajara initiated its LED street lighting program in 2013, soon after the city leadership entered office, in order to solve the problems described above and take advantage of the National Public Lighting Program. Although the city had previously considered upgrading street lights, previous mayors had deemed municipal resources insufficient to do so. Guadalajara now expects to achieve a fully operational street lighting system through this project. The city currently has approximately 80,000 street lights installed, all of them sodium-vapor luminaires; of these, half – 40,000 – will be replaced with LEDs, in 200 districts and along 100 roads. The project will also use a portion of the removed stock of still-operational sodium-vapor luminaires to replace the out-of-service luminaires in other parts of the city.
Updated: October 25, 2021