Boston Globe - For decades, they have been Boston’s eternal flames, burning bright day and night — vintage gas lamps strung along narrow, twisting streets of Beacon Hill and Charlestown, Bay Village, the North End, and the Back Bay. Hardly beacons of energy efficiency, the 2,800 lamps are environmentally retro in a world turning greener. But 600 gas lamps will soon be fitted with automatic igniters that make them flicker on at nightfall and off at daybreak, and save the city roughly $140,000 a year in fuel bills while reducing carbon emissions. The $450,000 cost of the devices — which work much the same as a grill igniter, by creating a spark — will be covered by an energy efficiency grant awarded by the state’s Department of Energy Resources. “Those gas streetlights are so important for the character and history of Boston,’’ City Councilor Matt O’Malley said. “But right now, it is so counter-intuitive that they are left on during the day.’’ The first gas lamps came to life at Haymarket Square in 1828, installed by the Boston Gas Company as a demonstration. Six years later, they appeared around Faneuil Hall. By the late 1800s, electric lamps were in vogue, supplanting their quaint gas forebears. And so it re mained until 1962, when the city, hoping to recapture the charm of an earlier era, reverted to gas lamps in Boston’s historic neighborhoods, a back-to-the-future transition that continued through the 1990s. “I’m all for saving money in the city,’’ said Geoff Smith, who has lived on Beacon Hill for seven years. “With fossil fuels being such a problem, it’s good to hear they’re doing this.’’
I'm just glad we discovered a way to conserve energy by using the Sun's natural ability to provide light this century...it would have been really embarrasing if we went a whole other 100 years before we figured this shit out.
I also love the fact that it took a fat government grant for us to get on this...like saving energy and money just wasn't important until the project became free because our comically indebted federal government decided to pay us to update our century old lamp posts.
If it took a century to figure out that we could save on fossil fuels by just turning off the lamps during the day then the Big Dig follies make a whole lot more sense. I mean couldn't we have paid a few homeless guys to go around lighting and extinguishing the lamps every day? Wouldn't that have been cheaper than burning oil 24 hours a day for decades like some Saudi Arabian fat-cats?
