How to look at the highway LED lighting? It is such a clear topic since there are so many practical applications that can be referred to both in theory and application area. As the matter of fact, highway LED lighting is humble in the application area, the “overheated” phenomenon in LED lighting industry exerted negative effects both on customers and manufacturers. However, failure cases are always followed with successful stories. The expensive material costs made the initial investments nearly unbearable. Under the government supports through energy conservation policies, highway LED applications entered a new era. Do these lamps have more use value than traditional high-way lamps and be more suitable for high-way conditions?
As the new lighting technology, LED has many advantages: long service life, high light efficiency, low power consumption, good dimming performance, good CRI, anti-vibration, single-direction lighting sources, environmental friendly. In one word, LED technology has been seen with huge potentials in the lighting market. Many domestic LED application manufacturers have shifted their attention into highway LED lighting area as a result of the rapid development of high-powered LED lighting technology. However, the domestic lighting industry seems to move into a vicious circle “LED=green lighting”. They placed too much value on LED but ignore the importance of traditional lighting applications. Mr. Tao Zhang from Lighting Management of Lianyungang, Jiangsu Province indicated that not only LED that can be marked as green lighting technology. In fact, many exiting lighting technology can be classified as green lighting, such like high pressure sodium lamps, which is more mature in technology. In Lianyungang, it is possible for street lights (250W high pressure sodium lamps) that made by OSRAM and GE can normally maintain a 5-year work without any problems. If taking the price factor into consideration, then there may not be much of an advantage to using LED street lights.
Some people may ask: how about the applications on highway? What are the advantages of LED lights and high pressure sodium lamps relatively in this area? “Currently, LED technology is still in the continuous development. Many technological bottlenecks have not been solved that. Nowadays the integrity and normalization of highway LED lighting has no effective solutions. Pilot applications are feasible, but had better not been used in large-scale applications.” said Mr. Tao Zhang.