The Overlooked Asset
Utilities spend millions enrolling individual customers in demand response programs -smart thermostats, water heaters, EV chargers -one household at a time. Meanwhile, street lighting sits right there on their own books: one of the largest predictable, controllable loads on the grid, operating during the exact hours when demand peaks.
Roughly 50% of U.S. streetlights are utility-owned. The other half belong to municipalities, where a single contract captures thousands of lights -no door-to-door enrollment, no customer opt-outs, no comfort complaints.
Yet nearly all of these lights run at full power from dusk to dawn, every night, regardless of conditions. It’s the streetlight effect in reverse: utilities are searching everywhere for demand flexibility except under the lights they already own.
Street lighting contributes approximately 2.3% of global electricity consumption. That’s not a rounding error -it’s a massive, untapped demand-side management opportunity hiding in plain sight.
Energy Savings Through Precision
The standard approach to streetlight dimming is crude: reduce everything by some percentage after midnight. It ignores the fact that a light over a six-lane intersection and a light in a residential cul-de-sac have completely different needs.
Photometrics AI takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of blanket dimming, the system calculates the optimal output for every individual luminaire based on its actual context -road geometry, fixture height, optic type, adjacent land use, and the overlapping beam patterns of neighboring lights.
This coordination is critical. When multiple fixtures illuminate the same area without knowing about each other, the result is redundant energy consumption. Photometrics AI’s algorithms account for these overlapping beam spreads, eliminating waste that traditional approaches can’t even see.
The result: 25% energy savings compared to baseline LED on/off operation -while maintaining or improving lighting quality at every calculation point, verified against ANSI/IES RP-8 standards.
And here’s the key insight: human eyes cannot perceive brightness changes under 20%, especially at night when pupils are dilated. A light running at 75% looks identical to one at 100%. There is enormous optimization headroom that has simply never been used.
Demand Side Management
Street lights don’t just consume energy -they consume it at the worst possible time. Evening peaks, early-morning ramps, hot summer nights when the grid is stressed: streetlights are on for all of it.
Photometrics AI transforms this liability into an asset through direct integration with grid operators and demand response programs. When CAISO or another grid operator issues an alert, the system automatically reduces lighting loads across the network -strategically, not uniformly. Critical areas like crosswalks and highway interchanges maintain full illumination while lower-priority zones dim to provide grid relief.
This demand response capability opens access to:
- Utility incentive programs for verified load reduction
- Grid services compensation for frequency regulation and capacity
- Avoided infrastructure costs by reducing peak demand on constrained circuits
Unlike residential demand response, there’s no customer pushback. Nobody calls to complain that their streetlight dimmed from 100% to 80% at 2 AM. It’s the most frictionless demand response resource available.
The Financial Case
Using California’s Avoided Cost Calculator (ACC) methodology -which accounts for generation energy, capacity costs, transmission and distribution infrastructure, greenhouse gas compliance, grid stability services, and system losses -Photometrics AI delivers $10.18 per streetlight per year in utility cost avoidance.
For a representative fleet of 20,000 streetlights at 50W average:
- Connected load: 1 megawatt
- Annual utility cost avoidance: $203,699
- Applied dimming: 25% savings during evening/pre-dawn; 50% savings from 1-5 AM
Across three California utility territories, this projects to $17.5 million in annual utility cost avoidance -and that’s before accounting for lights currently operating outside their optimal schedules, where the real-world savings potential is even greater.
The enrollment economics are compelling: one contract with a municipality or utility district captures thousands of controllable endpoints. Compare that to the per-household acquisition cost of residential demand response programs.
How to Apply
Coming soon -practical guidance for utility program managers on evaluating, piloting, and scaling intelligent street lighting optimization.