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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (9610)	10/12/2009 1:18:08 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24212

Interesting post at TOD from one of our energy conservation experts, a lighting consultant; photo at link. Added another comment by him. HereinHalifax on October 11, 2009 - 6:12pm According to the U.S. DOE, lighting consumes 22 per cent of all electricity generated in the United States -- some 8.2 quads in all. More than half of this energy is consumed within the commercial sector, where nearly two out of every five kWh is spent on this task. The DOE estimates that over 80 per cent of all commercial building built prior to 1980 still utilize older, inefficient T12 technology and for those buildings built prior to 1990, an estimated three-quarters are likewise T12 (the numbers for industrial buildings are likely to be very similar). That's about to change in a BIG way. On July 1, 2010, the magnetic ballasts that drive these systems will no longer be manufactured (since July 1, 2005 they have been sold for replacement use only). Following on this, as of July 14, 2012, virtually all T12 lamps and less efficient "700 series" T8s will no longer be made. By July 2013, most incandescent, halogen and even some halogen-IR reflector lamps will be phased out as well; these will be replaced by the latest generation of halogen-IR "plus" lamps. There are literally hundreds of millions of magnetically operated T12 fixtures still in operation, and retrofitting these with high performance T8 lamps and electronic ballasts will cut their power consumption by almost half. Replacing incandescent BR and halogen PAR lamps with halogen-IR plus lamps will cut this energy demand by half too. There are a tremendous number of metal halide and HPS fixtures that really should be replaced as well. The building shown below is just two years old. We will be pulling out the thirty 455-watt HIDs on this cross deck and installing 222-watt 6-lamp T8 high bay fluorescents in their place; light levels will remain about the same or come in slightly higher whilst electrical demand will fall by more than half. Converting just the HIDs you see in this picture will save enough electricity to power all of the new LED street lights in the Town of Annapolis Royal. Cheers, Paul theoildrum.com == Thanks for your kind words, MW. I wouldn't anticipate an eleven per cent reduction in total electricity demand as there is a mix of lighting technologies beyond T12 fluorescent; perhaps three to five per cent, but that's simply a guess and nothing more. With that, there would be a drop in air conditioning demand due to the corresponding reduction in heat load, i.e., for every one watt reduction in lighting load there's typically a 0.3 watt savings in cooling requirements. Daylight harvesting and occupancy sensors are another area where we can reap huge rewards. We just finished a retrofit of a local courier company where the lights in the sorting and loading areas were left on 24-hours a day even though these areas are unoccupied for much of the time (see below). In this case, we replaced high output 8 ft. T12 fixtures with F32T8s tandem industrials and cut the load by slightly more than half. We then cut this by half again by installing occupancy sensors that shut off the lights after 5 minutes of inactivity (each 24 x 40 ft. zone is independently controlled). Very simple, reliable and cost effective technology that should be used more widely. With respect to our services, we're a fairly small firm -- it consists of myself and two business partners, a couple employees and a larger number of sub-contractors who perform the physical work in the field. I'm not sure how much larger we want to grow -- we certainly have a lot on our hands just in terms of Nova Scotia Power's Small Business Lighting Solutions and their larger Commercial+Industrial programmes. NSP will be cranking up their efforts in this area over the next few months and we hope to expand our involvement with them. Cheers, Paul