LA Painted Streets White To Lower Temperatures and Southern Utah Could Do the Same

In 2018 the city of Los Angeles put a white coating on some of the streets to reflect the sun’s rays and bring temperatures down. Blacktop heats up in the sun and raises the temperature in the city and this was a plan to combat that effect.

Asphalt Can Raise Temperatures By 15 Degrees 

The heat created in an area dense with streets and parking lots has been studied and is called an urban heat island. This excessive heat can be dangerous to people and causes higher air conditioning bills. 

Paint has been created that can reflect the sun’s heat including an ultra-white paint developed at Perdue University that can reflect 98% of the sun’s rays. This cooled painted surfaces by 19 degrees and lowered surrounding temperatures. 

The experiment in Los Angeles of painting the streets did lower the ambient temperatures in those areas. The drawback is the cost of doing it and how long it will last. 

Will the Cost of Painting Streets Be Outweighed by Energy Savings? 

When they painted the streets in LA it cost them $40,000 per mile. It was estimated it would last 7 years before needing to be painted again. This cost was prohibitive and so they only did certain blocks to see how it would affect the area.  

Since there haven’t been a lot of streets painted since, they may have not seen enough immediate savings. I don’t think Utah will look at white paint for the roads in the southern part of the state any time soon. 

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Still, if you could lower temperatures by 15 degrees in the hottest part of the year and people were able to turn down their AC by that much, the overall savings might add up.