By: Danielle Ulman

The holiday lights that adorn Baltimore’s Washington Monument each December are getting an efficiency makeover. The lights will twinkle festively just as they did before, but they’ll use 90 percent less energy.

Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. will provide the energy efficient LEDs (light emitting diodes), which burn brighter and last longer than the incandescent lights that have heralded the holiday season for the last 37 years.

The company says using the LEDs for lighting the monument is part of its effort to meet the state’s EmPower Maryland goals — reducing power consumption 15 percent by 2015 — and to encourage Maryland residents to do the same.

The city will get its first glimpse of the new lights Thursday night during “A Monumental Occasion: The Annual Lighting of Baltimore’s Washington Monument.”

Nearly 17,000 bulbs on 84 strands of lights will decorate the Washington Monument this year. The monument’s old incandescent bulbs used approximately 40 watts per bulb, while one strand of LEDs contains 200 bulbs and uses 12 watts of energy.

The amount of electricity we use is measured by consumption over an hour through kilowatt-hours (1,000 watts = 1 kWh, so a 100 watt incandescent light bulb used for 730 hours – or all month long – would use 73 kWh).

Even if the city leaves the Washington Monument’s lights on all month long, electricity use would be about 735 kWh, well below the 1,000 kWh the average home uses each month. At 40 watts per bulb, if last year’s display also had 16,800 bulbs, lighting the monument for the month would have used 490,560 kWh.

Looks like the switch to LEDs should go a long way toward cutting electricity consumption at the monument…it remains to be seen if your neighbors will swap their North Pole lawn extravaganza lit by incandescent bulbs for LEDs.