The Trinidad and To­ba­go Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC) is con­tin­u­ing its ini­tia­tive to re­place High Pres­sure Sodi­um (HPS) street­lights with LEDs through­out the na­tion­al sys­tem, with the most re­cent in­stal­la­tions oc­cur­ring on Sad­dle Road, Mar­aval.

Ac­cord­ing to an of­fi­cial re­lease from the Min­istry of Pub­lic Util­i­ties, the up­grade will see the change-out of 145 HPS street­lights along the Sad­dle Road, start­ing at the Mar­aval Round­about.

“A fur­ther 88 LEDs are slat­ed for in­stal­la­tion, which will bring the to­tal num­ber of LEDs in­stalled to 233. Sur­veys are al­so on­go­ing in east, cen­tral, and south Trinidad, as well as To­ba­go. as the in­stal­la­tion of LEDs ex­pands fur­ther across the coun­try,” T&TEC re­vealed in the re­lease.

The com­pa­ny says this is in keep­ing with gov­ern­ment’s aim of im­prov­ing en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy and con­ser­va­tion na­tion­wide.

“LED bulbs car­ry sev­er­al ben­e­fits.  They have a longer life span—ex­ceed­ing 10 years as com­pared to 5 years for the High-Pres­sure Sodi­um lights—and con­sume half of the elec­tric­i­ty for the same lev­el of light­ing.  They al­so re­quire less main­te­nance. The re­duced elec­tric­i­ty us­age trans­lates in­to a low­er over­all nat­ur­al gas con­sump­tion for T&TEC and, by ex­ten­sion, the coun­try,” T&TEC said.

“In do­mes­tic set­tings, LEDs are sim­i­lar­ly ben­e­fi­cial for the con­sumer and the coun­try, us­ing up to 75 per­cent less en­er­gy when com­pared to in­can­des­cent bulbs and com­pact flu­o­res­cent lights (CFL),” it added.

T&TEC’s pro­gramme to phase out over 200,000 HPS bulbs start­ed in 2016 with a pi­lot project around the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah.  The com­pa­ny says since then, LEDs have been used to re­place HPS bulbs and for new in­stal­la­tions across the coun­try, in­clud­ing in Aripo, Lopinot, Pi­ar­co, Rien­zi-Kir­ton High­way, parts of the Solomon Ho­choy High­way, Ari­ma and Mil­ford Road To­ba­go. 

In ad­di­tion, so­lar LED street­lights have been in­stalled along the Man­zanil­la coast­line and part of the Pri­or­i­ty Bus Route.