At present, the commonly used color temperature for LED street light bulbs is around 5000K (Cool White). However, as for a road lighting system, a light color with 5000K will make pedestrians feel cold, and also reduce farsightedness ability of drives. Some experts even believe that street lights with a temperature higher than 4500K will increase the number of traffic accidents. The most suitable color temperature for LED street lights is around 3000K (Warm White or Yellow White).
However, even cool white LED street lights has been replaced by warm white LED street lights, problems still exist within LED street lighting business, due to the lack of an identified technique standard. LED lighting business has been developed nearly ten years in China, but still lack of unified technical standards in product specifications, including color temperature, working time, product dimensions, etc. Each manufacturer produces products in accordance with their own standards, leading to market confusion. Taking color temperature for instance, same LED street light bulbs with same color temperature (3000K) will have distinguished color if they from different manufacturers. Sometimes, this difference is obvious. Without any identical standard, it is impossible for products to be generally used. For example, a certain local government decided to use LED street lights from one manufacturer in a road-lighting project. After several years using, some of these lights are broken, they only can be replaced by the same products from the same manufacturer. In other words, lacking of an identified standard among LED manufacturers reduces the flexibility of LED products, at least making the update and replacement of them become more difficult.
Lighting rate is a rather important examining aspect of related department. According to Chinese present manufacturing technology, broken LED street light needs to be replaced entirely instead of partly. It is very bad for Chinese LED manufacturers. In order to reduce the fault rate, they have to raise their cost of production, as well as perform long-term maintains. And it is also a bottleneck which blocks the spread of LED street lighting business in overseas market. No one would like to use street lights can only be replaced entirely when they are broke down. Meanwhile, it blokes the development of LED manufacturers. Without these unnecessary cost for maintains, Chinese LED manufacturers would had more money for developing LED street lighting technology. How to get out of this wrong region, that all depends on what policy will be put in place.