Keeping the lights on bulb bright idea.

In Washington during the U.S. Conference of Mayors Winter meeting, President Barack Obama hosted 200 mayors at the White House and called on local leaders to upgrade 1.5 million street lights to high efficiency LEDs.
“Light bulbs are just the beginning”. It is a continuing effort of the administration to renovate outdated technology in communities around the country and save money and energy.
It is an odd reason for a political battle for phasing out of old fashion light bulbs.
In 2011 for the Republicans it was just that a fight between consumer freedom and government intrusion. Obama been criticize, even though the decrease in manufacturing of 100-watt incandescent light bulbs was actually the result of a law signed by George W. Bush in 2007 to promote energy efficient bulbs like LEDs.
LED technology, according to experts in the field the future of cities is about more than just saving money and energy, it is an opportunity for cities to fundamentally change the way they operate.
Future technology you could actually put a sensor and a network and gather information about what's going on in the city for cities to use.
One LED conversion company said converting old lights to LEDs allows cities to also install a network of sensors that gathers data about traffic patterns, weather, parking spots and even terrorism.
There are about 530 million high powered lights such as street lights, parking lot lights and warehouse lights in the country. And it was predicts that the U.S. would save about $94 billion a year in energy savings and maintenance, 290 million tons of CO2 emissions a year by switching those to LEDs.
In 10 to 15 years all the major cities in the US with LED lights. In that period of time, at least half of them will have advanced systems that gather this sensory information to help the city better manages.
The White House has announced commitments from 10 cities, two states and three regional networks to update their street lights.
President Obama works to what he can achieve in his remaining years of office, he told the mayors he is going beyond Washington, to local leaders in cities across the country.