The city has selected a vendor team led by the Ameresco, a Massachusetts-based energy efficiency company, for a project to modernize city streetlight system with the LED lights, city officials said on Monday.

On Wednesday, the proposed contract will be presented to the City Council. If approved by the council, the $160 million, four-year project will replace the 270,000 of city's light fixtures, starting from this summer, according to a joint announcement from the Mayor Rahm Emanuel, transportation department and also the Chicago Infrastructure Trust. The first year will focus on updating the streetlights in neighborhoods with "heightened public safety concerns," primarily on West and the South sides, the announcement said. The new LED lights will also be installed in the first year along about a dozen main arterial streets.

The new lights, that will be owned and operated by the city, will consume 50 to 75 percent less electricity than the existing high pressure sodium lights, and the savings will be used to pay the modernization costs, the city officials said. The city did not provide any copy of the vendor contract.

The new system will allow the lighting levels to be controlled remotely and will provide real-time updates when the outages occur, the city officials said. Lights will be focused down on the streets and sidewalks with the limited "light trespass" into homes, the city officials said.

The new project would also change the look of the city, since the LED lights provide a white-bluish light, rather than orange-yellow glare of the sodium lights.

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The city has been installing the LED streetlights since 2012 on a project-by-project basis, according to the city officials. Since the year 2015, all the new lights have been LED, totaling less than 1 percent of the city lights. A pilot project also sampled the LED lights in seven neighborhoods in December.

More than half the light fixtures will be assembled at the Chicago plant, and Ameresco has committed to using the city residents to perform at least 50 percent of the work on the project, according to the city officials.

Mrudula Duddempudi.