LED Runway Landing Lights
New Technology Pilots Major Energy Savings
- Steve Leinweber, Lighting Design Lab Lighting Specialist

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Applications

Aviation Lighting is used for many of the following applications: approach lights, azimuth and distance numbers, runway markers, runway edge, runway centerline, and taxiways. Green lights mark runway thresholds at the approach or landing end and are used on some taxiways or for the centerline. Blue lights are used to mark Taxiways. Yellow lights mark most major airport taxiways. Red lights mark runway departures and are used mark many runways. White lights are used to define runway edges. At a runway served by an Instrument Landing System (ILS), the white edge lights alternate with red lights starting at 1,000 feet from the end of the runway and then change to all red for the last 500 feet. According to the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA) there are five categories of runway visibility conditions, each determined by the length of the runway.

Energy and Demand Savings

If for example, 116 Watts - 13 Watts = 103 Watts saved. Then 103 Watts saved x 8,760 hours per year operation (24 hours, 365 days a year) = 902 kWh's saved per year x $ 0.08 per kWh = $72 per year saved per light. Then take 902 kWh's saved per year times 100 lights per airport equals 101,600 kWh's saved per airport. Multiply 101,600 kWh savings times 10,000 airports that equals 1,016,000,000 kWh's saved annually nationwide. At $0.08 per kWh that would equal $81,280,000 saved annually. The potential savings would be 116,000 kiloWatts or 116 MegaWatts. Conservatively, if we consider saving a minimum of $7,200 per airport and multiply that times the 10,000 that would equal = $ 72,000,000 million dollars of electric costs saved annually on airport lighting in the U.S. That would be a considerable amount of energy savings to reinforce electric utility generation capacities nationally.

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Figure 2: An LED airport landing light

Pictured above is an airport runway light using Light Emitting Diodes (LED's) as the light source. Conventional models of this luminaire type use 116W incandescent lamps. The new LED models use up to 90% less energy, with greatly reduced maintenance requirements.

Source: Dialight