OK, I have to write this. Our council is a bunch of well... very strange people. We're a small town (about 10,000 inh.) so probably anything is possible here.

Until 2016, our streetlights used to be HPS (maybe 75%), PL-L fluorescent, MH and a few MV. In the years 2016-2023, most of the old lights were replaced with LED lanterns, mostly with Philips Coreline Malaga LED 30W/4000K (and some other lantern types with about the same power and light colour). So far so good. It was a natural evolution, except they missed some places and let some single lanterns unchanged (as if they were unable to unmount them - rusted screws?). But these changes made sense from the point of energy saving.

What's really mad - they now replace those recently replaced LED lanterns (some of them less than 2 years ago!) with other LED lanterns types - noname (Ekosan LS) 5W/2700K. What's even more insane - they still keep some of the old lanterns (HPS/PL-L) and instead of that they replace the already energy saving Philips LED lanterns. And they do it in a very random way - like in a row of 10 lanterns they replace lanterns 2 and 7, or they replace the entire row except lantern 3. The result is an ugly mix of 4000K and 2700K plus the fact that 5W is too low power for the purpose. These new lanterns in the row of 30W lanterns look like failed/turned off. Places with majority of 5W lanterns are now lit very dimly.

I've asked our council wtf? and got some hazy replies on it was based on a study performed by an external company, installed by some other external company, it was a subsidy that had to be processed etc. I'm sure it must've been advantageous for some/one and even considered asking the police to investigate the case. The council would probably say that 5W is 6 times less than 30W and everything has been done in the right way. At least they promised to fix the most dark places (not by returning the 30W lanterns but by adding extra columns (savings, right?) and to unify some ugly colour mixes in my neighbourhood.

There's hardly another place in the world with such a street lighting mess lacking a tiny bit of common sense.

Geez, that's nuts! The lowest wattage lanterns in use near me are 18w led. They seem decent quality.

And this id***y, when these upgrades are planned by heavily corrupted complete mo**ns is what gives the LEDs the bad rep, not the LED lanterns themself...

Exactly. People get angry because of unnecessary road/street repairs, cutting healthy trees in urban areas etc. so street light replacements are relatively safe. Most people will probably notice the change but they're ok with that if there's at least some light.

I just hope it's more like idiocy than actual corruption. The current philosophy "if something works fine and most people like it, it's time to discontinue it" so typical for IT world has probably infected other areas. Maybe I'm too old, but in a corporate company I work for, we're in a continuous process of migrating from solution X to solution Y, depending on who a board member has played golf with.

We've got a 3,300W kettle at home. It's necessary to downgrade 132 pcs. of 30W streetlights to 5W ones to achieve the same savings. They hardly replaced such a number of streetlights, yet they created a lighting mess with dark places where you almost need to use a head lamp or smartphone to walk safely.

I get replacing LED street lights if they're old and lost a lot of light or their colour has shifted from the original, but replacing perfectly good lights with something even dimmer for absolutely no reason at all is just plan stupid. What's next in the future, they remove the 5w lights in favor of having the moon light up the streets because the moon is "100% maintenance free and environmentally friendly"? 

In my community, street light replacements are done based on if it's led or not. If the light is working led, doesn't matter if it's an ancient early gen or brand new, they won't replace it. Only if it's not led, or it has some issues, they will replace it.

But the replacements are based on what they have in stock. So there's a mismatch of lights here, of different brands and wattages (anywhere between 20w-100w), but what makes it okay is that all are of the same colour temperature (that is, cold 6500k).