If your building relies on inefficient lighting, such as fluorescent tubes and high intensity discharge (HID) high bay or exterior lighting, you’re missing out on significant savings. Updating your lighting can be a great first step when it comes to making your building an efficient one. Lighting makes up 17% of all electricity consumed in U.S. commercial buildings, meaning there’s plenty of opportunities to make your lighting more energy efficient. LEDs also pack a serious punch for the environment. LEDs also pack a serious punch for the environment. By 2027, widespread use of LEDs could reduce our nation’s electricity use equal to the annual electrical output of 44 large electric power plants, and lead to total savings of more than $30 billion. In order to facilitate this transformation of the lighted workplace, the PUD offers incentives to convert to LED lighting systems.
Who Qualifies?
The program is called our Commercial and Industrial Lighting Program, but a more accurate description is perhaps our Non-residential Lighting Program. This is because in addition to general commercial and industrial enterprises that qualifies, we also offer these incentives to non-profits, churches, school districts, and other government entities, including ourselves.
LED Lighting
With LED lighting, you can greatly reduce the electricity used by your building with many light fixtures available to meet a wide variety of needs and applications. There are countless opportunities to make the switch to LED, including office lighting, warehouse lighting, area- and streetlights, as well as sign lighting to name but a few.
Upgrading to LEDs can improve your business and performance. LEDs:
- Provide the same brightness, while reducing energy consumption by more than 40% compared to fluorescent and more than 50% compared to HID lighting systems.
- Last 15 times longer, which means big financial savings on operations and maintenance.
Visual performance and comfort.
The right lighting can optimize a person’s ability to perform visual tasks, it’s important to carefully review the types of tasks that happen in a space when evaluating a potential lighting retrofit or redesign.
- Positive visitor impression. Lighting has an important effect on a visitor’s first impression of a space. The right lighting can help businesses cultivate the intended visitor experience.
- Safety and security. Both indoors and outdoors, quality lighting promotes safety and peace of mind for visitors. For people approaching a building or using a parking lot, white light with a higher correlated color temperature makes outdoor areas appear brighter and feel safer.
- Alertness, health, and well-being. Lighting can play an important role in improving the health and well-being of workers and students who spend much of their time indoors. New control systems allow a facility operator to control nearly all aspects of the lighting in their building to improve the environment for inhabitants.
Networked Lighting Controls
Networked lighting controls (NLC) are a great tool to help businesses improve lighting performance and save money on energy bills. If you’re thinking about an LED upgrade, make sure you include controls in your lighting plan. Today’s networked lighting controls use wireless capabilities to connect light fixtures into one easy-to-use system that can be managed from anywhere. One type of advanced control, luminaire level lighting controls (LLLCs), embeds the technology into each fixture for even more fine-tuned, localized control. Connected through a wireless hub, these controls require no rewiring for installation, which means less labor and lower costs. Networked controls come ready to go out of the box, needing nothing more than simple programming. Ease of use and expanded benefits, networked lighting controls are finding new fans among contractors and users. Their performance speaks for itself: they dim lights, sense occupancy, adapt to daylight and can easily adjust to the changing needs of a space and its occupants.
Incentives
There are so many different lighting configurations, using different lighting technologies, that can be converted to LED, that I can’t list all of the different incentives here. But for a simple three lamp fluorescent office fixture we offer $8 dollars per LED tube, $30 for a dedicated 44-Watt LED fixture, or $80 for a dedicated networked 44-Watt LED fixture. Give us a call, as we’d love to talk to you about how we can help improve your lighting, reduce energy consumption, and bring some of that BPA rebate money back in to your business and our community.
If you have any questions regarding this article or if you would like to discuss any other energy saving opportunities, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We work for you - you can reach us via email EnergyConservation@clallampud.net, call us at (360) 565-3249. For more information on our commercial programs visit https://www.clallampud.net/ways-to-save/rebates-incentives/commercial/
