Nice to see these alive in 2012 and having missed the great HPS changeout. I wonder how long they'll last before they succumb to the great LED changeout.

LED street lights will not work. Induction Lamps is the new and the good typ of lights.

Yeah there are a good number of mercs in RI. The 100W mercs like this one are still serviced but the remaining 175 and 400W mercs get replaced upon failing. There's a good amount of 400W mercs down in the South Sounty area. Many of the waterfront towns have resisted the MV changeout almost compleatly while more urban areas such as Cranston and Pawtucket still have some mercs too. There are some towns that have NO mercs at all becuase the city requested it. Warwick is supposedly one of them. I do see the occasional merc or two even there. I suppose all this time I've been taking for granted how many mercs are actually left here in RI.

BTW, there has been talk for a few years now about an LED changeout but I haven't seen any test sites. The state want to test them out but NGrid, the electric company here, is quite resistant in buying any LED streetlights. Probably because A) they're too cheap to buy them and B) NGrid is already making so muh profit off of the municipalities by ripping them off every time the lamp or PC dies. With LEDs they wouldn't need as many linemen, but they wouldn't get as much profits either.

They have a huge deal with GE (and cooper as a backup in the event they're dissatisfyed with the quality of GEs as they are now because of the GE ballasts leaking voltage into the nuetral line) so they get everything at a giant discount, so they don't pay full price for any of their streetlighting stuff. To be quite honest, I think NGrid's streetlight program is jsut a huge scam for more revenue. They have fees for pretty much EVERYTHING.

In fact, may Massachusetts towns have been fed up with NGrid ridiculous fees and have bought the streetlights so they can have a private utility service them. This is another big rip-off since NGrid gets top dollar for the lights they sell even though the lights are well depreciated in value to the point where they're only worth the metal they're made from and on top of that, NGrid pays less for the lights when they were brand new!

Slightly off topic but I wonder if the few remaining mercs in Ontario made it though 2012. I have feeling that they'll skip HPS when it comes time to replace them though.