The Performance and Impact of LED Floodlights in an Outdoor Electrical Substation During Misty Weather Conditions

The reluctance of operational staff in an electrical utility to support the move from traditional high-pressure sodium (HPS) floodlights to light-emitting diode (LED) floodlights in outdoor substation environments has been reported to be based on their belief that LED floodlights are more costly (due to their high initial installation costs), technically not equivalent and that they perform poorly under misty conditions. The benefits of transitioning to LED floodlights has been proven to be both technically viable and financially more feasible, from a total lifecycle cost perspective, in a concurrent study conducted by the authors, and reported on in another paper. The objective of this study was to therefore conduct a series of tests, both outdoor and in a more controlled indoor laboratory setting, to test the postulation that higher temperature LED floodlights (6500 K) do not perform as well as equivalent warmer floodlights (3000 K) during misty weather conditions. The results of these experiments showed that there was an insignificant difference in visibility when using either of these lights under these conditions.