The streetlights along Tverskaya Ulitsa look a little different than they did last week. They're yellower, made of unbreakable plastic instead of vandalizable glass, and they cost the city less money to run.


Under a $1.3 million program funded by the U.S. government, General Electric Lighting on Friday began installing new, energy-saving lamps along Moscow thoroughfares, a yearlong undertaking that is to replace every streetlight within the Garden Ring, some 7,000 in all.


Alexei Stepanov, technical director of the Moscow City Lighting department, said the program will save the municipal government 614 million rubles ($138,000) a year in energy and maintenance costs.


"A lot of lamps are broken daily in the city -- they are made out of glass and are really easy to break," Stepanov said. But the GE variety are thug-proof, he said, eliminating the need for constant replacements.


The new lamps are also 40 percent more efficient than the old ones, Stepanov said, thus providing equal luminescence at far lower wattage. And while he said the majority of Moscow lamps now use white-tinted mercury in their bulbs, the GE ones will all be sodium, which casts a yellower hue.


Brook Horwitz, regional manager of General Electric Lighting, a subsidiary of the U.S. multinational, said the program is a part of a drive by the U.S. Agency for International Development to encourage the use of energy-efficient equipment in foreign countries.


"This is a demonstration project to show you can save energy through a rational use of lighting equipment," Horwitz said.


The U.S.-made lamps will save Moscow 2 million kilowatts of power annually and bring the Russian capital closer to Western standards, he said.


Stepanov said installing 7,000 lamps on 375 streets in central Moscow would take about a year. He added that 22,000 more city lamps needed replacement, which could be funded by the energy savings.


Mayor Yury Luzkhov officially inaugurated the lighting program with a flick of the switch Friday evening on Tverskoi Bulvar.