In Los Angeles, a significant issue of copper wire theft from streetlights has prompted a shift to solar-powered alternatives. With over 27,000 miles of copper wiring connecting streetlights to the power grid, thefts have soared, leading the city to spend more than $100 million on repairs in recent years. In response to the problem, LA has begun replacing traditional lights with solar-powered models, which are not vulnerable to wiring theft. The initiative aims to enhance street safety and optimize energy consumption while reducing repair costs associated with copper theft.
Los Angeles has recently discovered a promising solution to the growing problem of copper wire theft linked to its streetlights: the city is swapping traditional street lights for solar-powered versions that are not attached to the larger power system and thus have no copper wire to steal. Instead, the new lights are equipped with batteries that fill up on solar energy during the day and discharge it after dusk falls. “It’s been tremendously successful,” said Miguel Sangalang, executive director and general manager of LA’s Bureau of Street Lighting. While copper-wire theft isn’t a new plight for LA, it’s become more prevalent in recent years as rising prices have made it more lucrative to sell the stolen metal. In the last decade, theft and vandalism have jumped from representing just a few percent of the Bureau of Street Lighting’s service requests to 40% today, according to a spokesperson for the department. Since 2020, the city has spent over $100 million repairing such damage.
On Reddit, residents complain of “pitch black” neighborhoods that feel unsafe. The city isn’t about to replace all of its more than 220,000 streetlights with solar. So far, it’s only deployed around 1,100 of the new fixtures and plans to install at least 400 more this fiscal year. The Bureau of Street Lighting is still figuring out its long-term strategy, but for now, it’s focused on rolling out solar lights where they can do the most good: areas with lots of theft. “[We’re] testing it in incremental steps,” Sangalang said. “But we see ourselves going into it much harder and much faster in the near future.”
Other U.S. cities are thinking along the same lines. Clark County, home to Las Vegas, began testing solar streetlights last summer after dropping more than $1.5 million over two years to fix vandalized lights. St. Paul, Minnesota, decided to install the city’s first solar streetlights this year, fed up after spending over $2 million in 2024 on repairs only for thieves to strike again days later. San Jose, California, which had about 1,000 streetlights out due to copper theft in early July, is currently planning a pilot, pending funding availability. These are small-scale experiments, but they still reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions by introducing more clean energy into major cities. One of the solar lighting companies that LA is working with estimates that deploying 10 of its sun-powered streetlights in Europe would cut carbon emissions by 60 metric tons over four decades — the same pollution footprint as seven flights around the Earth.
Inspired by a suggestion from a field electrician, LA began testing off-grid solar lights in 2022 with $200,000 in grants from the city’s innovation fund. In early 2024, the city rolled out its first concentrated, large-scale deployment of 106 solar lights in the Van Nuys neighborhood — a hotspot for theft that is located far from the Bureau of Street Lighting’s headquarters downtown. “We’d spend two hours on the road trying to do a repair if we had to go back and forth,” Sangalang said. The goal in Van Nuys was to create a “maintenance-free zone,” said a spokesperson for the Bureau of Street Lighting. It’s working: in a year and a half, the department hasn’t had to deal with a single instance of damage related to theft and vandalism. Among
Source: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/copper-wire-theft-la-streetlights