July 16, 2015

Linda Sandahl: 
Welcome ladies and gentlemen, I’m Linda Sandahl with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and I’d like to welcome you to today’s webinar “High-Efficiency parking Lighting Strategies for Federal Agencies”, brought to you by the US Department of Energy’s Federal Energy Management Program. 

We are very happy to have our speaker today, Michael Myer, of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Michael is a senior researcher at PNNL and has been with the laboratory since 2007. He is involved in several major lighting programs including appliance standards, lighting energy efficiency and parking, these campaigns, the interior lighting campaign, and other market transformation type programs. He has written many papers and journal articles on LED technology and energy codes and provides presentations on these subjects at many conferences and web events. He received his MS in lighting from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has held the LC lighting professional credential since 2003. 

Michael, please begin.

Michael Myer:  
Thanks Linda. We are going to focus on high efficiency parking lighting strategies as the presentation is titled. One of the reasons why parking is actually such a great starting point for energy efficiency is that esthetically and functionality wise it doesn’t actually require a lot of logistics. If you think about some of the interior lighting or even non-lighting things, such as mechanical, that involves a lot of other infrastructure. Lighting doesn’t require a lot of other infrastructure. Often times you can isolate it and when it comes to parking lighting you can often do it overnight or on the weekends and it does not really effect the workflow of a given facility for the most part compared to interior spaces where you might have to move a group of occupants out for a period of time to renovate the lighting in a certain office. It is a great starting point.

The other key thing that we will talk about, that we will briefly later, is that maintenance is always a great way to economize the energy efficiency upgrades.  While the energy efficiency savings are quite impressive, we found that the economics are bolstered through monetizing maintenance. The center picture there is a standard parking lot – we’ve all seen these. On average it can easily cost $200 to get that lamp serviced either possibly through a third party vendor or possibly if your own site does your own on site management/maintenance. If you actually sat down and calculated how often facilities crews were going out to replace lighting you might actually realize that the savings can be monetized later. The other image in the upper left that I want to mention, briefly because we aren’t going to spend enough time on it later because it is only partially lighting related, is what’s called a solar canopy. These are becoming much more common in parking lots and also in the roofs of parking structures. The Idea here is that it is covered parking, per-se, and on top of the covered parking area, they put PV panels. So you generate onsite energy. The advantage of not only generating onsite energy is that by creating a panel for the covering and for the PV you now have created a surface to mount fixtures for lighting. The advantage there is that you are bringing the fixture down and by bringing it closer to the surface that you are lighting you can actually use a lower output fixture and thus save energy in the process. 

So a lot of ideas, but we’re not going  to spend too much time on PV because that is really less lighting related and more related to onsite generation. If you tie them together there is some great synergy, so I wanted to tie them together.  

Quickly, the major learning objectives for this presentation is to understand high efficiency technology options including LEDs and a great focus on lighting controls.  Were also going to discuss technology options and considerations facilities staff should be aware of. We’re going to discuss some federal purchasing requirements for exterior lighting fixtures. There are some really interesting things you need to know about.  Finally we’re going to discuss the Federal LEEP Campaign. LEEP is the Lighting Energy Efficiency in Parking Campaign, an ongoing program co-organized by the Department of Energy, Building Owners Management Association (known as BOMA), the International Facilities Management Association (known as IFMA), the Green Parking Council, and the International Parking Institute. 

Parking Facilities:  As I mentioned they’re a great place to start at your facility for energy efficiency because you don’t have to worry about aesthetics as much or workflow. Why also are they important? It’s because they also represent significant energy use as federal facilities.  Nationwide, there are about 600 million parking spots; these are off street in parking lots, and about 100 million parking spots in parking structures in the US. There are 325 sq. ft. per parking spot needed for each parking space. This adds up to many billion sq. ft. in parking area. We light a lot of it and a lot of parking spaces are empty, especially in a structure environment where many people go home at a set time. Overnight that’s parking spaces being lighted and yet unoccupied. There is a great savings potential there. 

Here’s just a quick graph we put together. We’re often asked about what the typical energy usage is. The industry itself is still coming to term on some of these numbers. We developed some initial data based on the LEEP Campaign and some other data sources. We’re using a metric of EUI which is Energy Unit Intensity. Often we see this unit in kilowatt BTUs but because lighting doesn’t typically use natural gasses the input we state in kWh because it’s easy to convert. We see that in parking lots, the median and the mean are about 0.56 kWh per square foot. We will talk about why that’s significant in a second.  Parking structures are about 1.2 to 1.3 kWh per square foot. What’s important is to notice the standard deviation. Those numbers are huge. There’s a lot of variation, obviously, because of how much you are lighting your parking facility, these numbers can vary or the operation hours which are going to have a direct roll. We will walk through more about how those numbers were developed in a little. To tie them back together two prominent buildings that are very large and it was very easy to grab some data about them. The Wilshire Federal Building in Los Angeles has almost 1 million sq. ft. of interior office space.  When you look at the amount of parking associated with that building,  they’re using about 280 thousand kWh a year just to light the parking lot in that building. We also have the Francis Perkins Department of Labor; this is almost a 2 million sq. ft. building in Washington DC. It has a parking structure that is quasi subterranean and partly above ground that is part of the building. It is using almost 400,000 kWh to light its parking structure, or at one time it was. Why this is important is that when you start comparing the numbers I just showed you at 280 thousand and 400 thousand kWh respectively. When you compare that to building usage, how we generate these building usage numbers is we use the standard Energy Star portfolio number for standard offices and just converted it. We don’t have the raw data here to do the exact conversions. It came out to that roughly parking was 1 to 1.5 percent the energy usage of those buildings.  What is also significant is that the lighting is roughly $20,000 to $40,000 just to operate the electricity to operate that lighting. So, again, why are these numbers important? Reducing parking lighting is easy. As you will see later in this presentation, a lot of federal facilities have saved significant amounts of energy 60 to even 90 percent energy savings have been achieved. That’s real cost savings in many thousands of dollars. If you have an agency goal of X% by 2020 compared to a certain benchmark, parking is a great first place to get some easy gains that can be easily quickly assessed. 

In addition to some of the other things, FEMP has developed a number of resources over the last couple of years.  This first one is the Exterior Lighting Guide for Federal Agencies. It was developed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the California Lighting Technology Center.  It was published in August of 2010. The only reason I really need to highlight that date is that in the last five years, a lot of lighting has changed relating to lighting controls some of the development of LEDs. So while I think the Exterior Lighting Guide does a great job of walking you through the process, how to determine different aspects of what you need to do onsite, and how to plan for it, it also does a great job of comparing different technologies. I would just caveat that some of those technologies, being LEDs, have changed from some of the documents they have provided. 

We’ll do background on some basic terms, we should talk about them. So the amount of light emitted, this is measured in lumens. Up until 2005 or 2010 as an industry we really talked in Watts. “Oh it’s a 1000 Watt fixture it’s an 800 Watt fixture”, those type of things. Wattage really was not a great way to describe the amount of light output, it was easy to understand, it was easy to think about, it directly relates the amount energy you’re using, and it was just a great number. We now have sources that produce different amounts of light for the amount of power you input. Just referring to watts now is really not a good way to do it because the wattage of an LED device is not directly comparable to the wattage of a metal halide fixture to determine the amount of light. The industry and the Department of Energy has really tried to encourage with an ad campaign and an information campaign,” let’s move away from watts, lets focus on lumens”. I often equate this to a gallon of milk. You don’t buy milk by the dollar. You don’t buy four dollars’ worth of milk; you buy a gallon of milk. It’s the quantity and lumens are that. So we want to focus on lumens not just on watts.  

Correlating color temperature this is a pretty interesting topic. The color bar on the right shows the typical gradation. This is the appearance of the light source. Typical light sources can be as low as around 2000 kelvin. They can get around up to about 7500 Kelvin. This is not a performance measure. It does not mean that a low value is good or a high value is good. It is just how that value roughly falls on this color diagram here. That is all it tells you. As an industry, we have generally tried to specify products that are in about 3000 K to about 5000 K range because they’re familiar with us to certain light sources. There is some research going on right now about the effects of high color temperature on possible fauna or flora in the area. There are some agencies and some jurisdictions where they might be prescribing or requiring lower color temperature. If you happen to have a federal site near a national observatory or other type of spectral issue where they might be doing a lot of sensitive evaluations at night, they might have other requirements that you might need to focus on like a certain color temperature so that devices can filter those out. Specifically near astronomical observatories, they really focus on that. 

Color rendering index, this is a scale of 1 to 100. It’s a scale of how well something renders color.  The key caveat here is that the test was based on a pastel sample and we have learned that that is really a limitation on this metric.  The industry is actually starting to look at other metrics. Before people started focusing on color, they said “we need high color temperature, high color rendering sources”, but really for parking applications you don’t really need to discriminate between mauve and red or green and puce, it really just needs to be that you can tell high level differences. That being said, if you are going to use the color rendering metric, really a color rendering of 70 or greater is all that is necessary. Anything more is overkill. That’s just a quick overview on some color characteristics and some light output characteristics.

Luminaire Efficacy Rating – this is by far becoming a more common metric in industry. This is going to be important related to federal purchasing guidelines in a second. It’s a pretty simple idea, at a high level it’s the total light output from the fixture divided by the input electrical power. It’s a great first estimate of energy efficiency. Obviously, the higher lumens per watt at the fixture level or the luminaire level the value is, the more light output it generates.  The concern is that these three diagrams do a good representation of three types of fixtures. The first one on the left is a very traditional parking lot fixture, where almost all the light is emitted strait down. The one in the middle is more of what we call a decorative or possibly a post top fixture. These are used in certain places where there is a pedestrian scale desired. The one on the left is used for around the parking lot and the same with the one on the right. In the one in the middle, not all the light is being directed down. The one on the right, some of the light is going down, some of the light is going sideways, and some of the light is going up. In this case, the image on the right could probably have a higher luminaire efficacy value because all of the light is leaving the fixture yet it’s not always going where it’s desired. LER is a great starting point, it gives you a first cut of what you want, but the key thing to think about is the distribution you need. Don’t just think about  “I need LER 80 or 90”, that is a great starting point, but what you need to do is make sure you are pairing your fixture type for your application with getting the light distributed to where you want it to be as well as places you may not want it to be. If it’s near a barracks on a military facility you might not want some of the light leaving directly from the side of the fixture and going into some of the housing. You need to think about distribution. It is just as important as the specific LER of the fixture. 

Following up on that, this is a picture from Quantico Virginia the Marine base there.  They were able to save significant energy savings at this parking lot as well as on base at over 100 parking lots. We’ll talk more about their parking lots later. How they did this was one, they replaced an inefficient light source. The Marines at Quantico had a variety of light sources that are mercury vapor which is a very old light source and high pressure sodium. They replaced a bunch of them with LEDs so right there they save energy. The other thing they did was replace the fixture that I described as a post top (which is somewhat decorative so the light is going everywhere and while it’s generating a lot of light, not a lot of light is getting where you want it to go) by putting in an LED fixture with better optical systems, the overall fixture had less light output because it was all being directed down to the work plane you want. It is definitely possible to save energy by making a better choice on the light fixture as well as the light source. 

This table is a comparison at the fixture level of different light sources and how they work in parking applications. These are general high level comparisons for both parking lots and parking structures. You’ll see a huge range of sources from high-pressure sodium all the way down to LED. This is a table that is extrapolated from the Exterior Lighting for Federal Agencies that I showed earlier.  It has been modified so you can see it at a fixture level. You will see that what you probably have on site right now is either metal halide or high pressure sodium. In some cases you might have some mercury vapor but if you look in there the LER of mercury vapor is at 15-30 lumens per watt. That is pretty inefficient technology and it is surprising it still shows up. We’ve seen it small handful, 15% of federal spaces we’ve looked at have this technology still. If you have it you should definitely think about getting rid of it. 

The color characteristics of different lighting technologies that are HID have some of the lower CRI but you will see that induction and LED (which are considered more high efficiency sources and have longer life) and that there are options that many federal facilities are considering have pretty high CRI. You will see that the lifetimes range – most traditional HID light sources are in this 10 to 20 thousand range that’s when I mentioned earlier. If your lights operate dusk to dawn in a parking lot, then they’re on almost 4400 hours a year. If you are in a parking structure then they’re on about 8800 hours a year.  If you look at some of those numbers, that means that some of the lamps in the light fixtures are being replaced once for every two or three years. As I said, that adds up very quickly just from a cost point of view. That is why a lot of people who in addition to going to a high efficiency source have also tried to couple that with a long life source. That where induction and LED are definitely preferred sources because if you can reduce the time of service then you are reducing the amount of money overall that can be put back into the project. For LED fixtures, I mentioned the Exterior Lighting Guide it was a little dated so I went out and looked at a range of data. The efficacy of LED fixtures can range from as low as 19 lumens per watt to as high as 150 lumens per watt. We found that in the data we surveyed there was an average of 85 lumens per watt. If you look at this table you will see that, for the most part, LED fixtures tend to be already toward the high end. Even the average LED fixtures tend to be towards the high end of luminaire efficacy compared to almost everything else on the table. The key thing here I should mention about low pressure sodium, that’s the second row there, that’s  a monochromatic source which means it’s extremely orange and it’s considered very efficient because it’s a mathematical function but the downside is that it has really poor color and it is only used in extreme circumstances. So don’t think that that 98 to 128 make it a desirable source, I should mention that LER is a first check but you need to look at other things as well.
I mentioned earlier that we would talk about some of the procurement methodology. Years ago, congress said that in the absence of an ENERGY STAR specification for certain equipment, and they have a whole range of it, not just lighting but definitely lighting is covered, the FEMP program would designate performance levels. This table is from FEMP’s main levels. You can see that for parking garage luminaires the minimum LER for a parking garage fixture needs to be 70 lumens per watt. For outdoor pole and area, that is your typical parking lot fixture, you need to be in the 65 lumens per watt or greater range to specify it. What is good to know is that on the FEMP designation page – by the way, at the bottom of all these slides you will see that where the information was either referenced in the source slide or where some of this information can be found. Also at the end of this presentation we will include a list of references where you can go to find all of these URLs.  The reason I mention that is the FEMP website says, “Here’s what the outdoor performance for LER needs to be for all these different light fixtures”. You might be left with the question “how do I know what type of light fixture this is” “how do I find this fixture” and that type of thing. FEMP working with another DOE program was able to customize the LED Lighting Facts website which is being shown here. This is a publicly available database where you can actually go sort by the federal requirements. They have over 30,000 fixtures on here. They’re not all outdoor parking fixtures. There are definitely interior fixtures as well as some lamps. You can actually see there at the bottom, the paragraph text says “click here to see the FEMP acquisition text products”. The value here is that FEMP sets some levels but FEMP also helps provide you with a tool to find applicable products that meet their requirements. The advantage there is that you can then identify them, download them to an Excel files, sort by other characteristics you might want, include line item specification numbers for fixture types into your document right off the bat rather than having to hunt and peck for certain fixtures. 

Other things FEMP has done: As I mentioned, FEMP has many levels. In spring of 2013 FEMP released a guide FEMP-Designated Parking Lot Lighting. This is about a 20 page document that covers a lot of aspects of parking lighting; not just the FEMP designation but it walks you through criteria when you are considering fixtures, how to do the calculations to determine light output and input power.  There’s a good primer on color and other things to consider. It also gets into distribution and provides a few good high level guides there, as well as uniformity questions. Uniformity is just the range of light values across the parking facility. You can see on this picture on the cover there is definitely a light spot and a dark spot. Uniformity is the comparison of those two data points. The guide provides you some information about what you might want, what is desirable, and how to characterize certain data points. What’s great to go along with the parking lot guide? Well, it’s a parking structure guide. Pretty much at the same time, FEMP released a similar document for parking structures. Again it walks through uniformity, distribution, and light sources. They are both about 20 pages long roughly. There are definitely similar pages that are completely the same about color because that is a basic. Each document walks through some of the different characteristics that you might need to consider for your parking application. 

So a quick review of some lighting technologies: I mentioned this earlier; mercury vapor (MV), very old technology, and its almost 100 years old at this point. I mentioned that the Marine Corp Base in Quantico replaced a 250 watt MV fixture with a 110 LED fixture in one parking lot alone and saved more than 60% energy. As one colleague of mine said, “That’s not low hanging fruit, that’s fruit on the ground”. It’s important that the Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005 which banned the sale and import of MV ballasts. Why that’s important is you can’t buy or sell these ballasts in the US since 2008 and these ballasts have a ten year life on average, that means by 2018 all these ballasts that are left out there and MV fixtures should start failing. As I said earlier, you can reap significant energy savings if you have this technology. Pretty soon you are going to have to replace it anyway because when the ballast fails the lamp in the fixture won’t be able to start. First thing I would tell you is to take a quick inventory of what light fixtures you have and if you have any MV, they should be at the top of your list right off the bat. 

High pressure sodium: This is probably a more ubiquitous, what you are used to in your parking lot. Some parking fixtures, definitely about 80% of what we see in street lighting in the US right now, it’s this orange appearing fixture. The parking lot below the fixture in this picture shows what they typically are. They’re pretty efficient – from a lumens per watt point of view, they do a good job. They are near the limit of how to make them efficient. There is not much we can do to magically add efficiency to that. Why I mention that is we’re near the limit is that if you have them, you’re not going to be able to wait for next year’s model to upgrade. They don’t dim well and they don’t turn on and off well. That limits their use with lighting controls. We’ll see in a bit the value of lighting controls. They can add to significant energy savings. I would definitely consider start looking at all your high pressure sodium fixtures. 

Metal halides: these are the more whitish appearing light fixture. They’re pretty efficient but they are also near their limit. Again same problems with high pressure sodium they don’t really dim and you can’t turn them on and off.  That limits you with controls. 

Probably most of you are thinking about LEDs, have thought about LEDs, or are considering LEDs. About five years ago or so we were still in the Wild West meaning that products were all over the place. Some of the guarantees in the product quality statements were not actually accurate. Those days have mostly passed. I do have to say that some manufacturers claim that they are LM-79 certified; they’ve passed LM-79. If you hear someone talking about LM-79, good because that is the testing methodology of how you test an LED fixture but that’s about all they should be saying about it. If they try to claim that it is a badge of honor or a certification then they’re wrong and I’d be a little concerned. That is a marketing claim and it is not as important. The other thing is that LED life is going to be long. The industry is pretty confident of those values. What isn’t going to be as long life is some of the other electrical components, even something as basic as a solder joint or as big as a driver life. That’s where some of your larger failure points are coming in, not just the LED itself. When you start looking into these I would definitely say a manufacturer may claim a 50,000 or 80,000 -I’ve seen claims that are even 130,000- when they start talking about those values they are specifically talking about the light output of an LED and how long it will take to reach a certain point of depreciation.  What I would definitely make sure you ask is “What about the driver”. The driver is like a ballast, essentially a power supply, it’s what operates the LED. Manufacturers should be looking at 5 or 10 year life or warranties depending on how they’re defining it and depending on their drivers. The claims on the LEDs themselves are great but focus on the drivers because once that fails you have to send someone out to service it and that’s a cost.  LEDs also like the cold, they work really well in the cold.  Heat is not always been their friend. Focusing on federal facilities, I like to highlight that the US Customs Border Patrol in Yuma, Arizona which is really one of the hottest inhabited places in the US has deployed a series of LED flood lighting along the Mexican American border. If LEDs can work there, they can probably work in most other extreme temperature environments there.  LEDs work well because they turn on quickly and dim easily and that’s a great way to save energy. 

As I mentioned earlier, we’ve talked about this a couple of times, distribution and design matter. These are two different parking garages.  But why they matter, the one on the right is painted. If you are thinking about doing anything in you parking garage and you’re upgrading the lighting, we always say “talk about surfaces”. Ideally if you can just clean it and or paint it, while those are costs, they will increase your lighting without doing anything else. While it won’t save you energy, if you paint a dark parking structure along with upgrading the lighting you can actually save more energy because you can reduce your output because the light is not getting absorbed.  

Distribution matters – recent research has shown that the more uniform a parking facility is the more you can achieve energy savings.  Your eye adapts to bright and dark spots so by getting rid of those stark contrasts between bright and dark, you can actually reduce the overall output because your eyes has already adapted.  

Lighting controls – I can’t mention lighting controls enough. This is how your facility is going to greatly increase its energy savings. You can use simple time based ones, on/off. I would tell you that if you are doing that right now, the next thing to consider when going to a high efficiency solution is something that happens in the middle of the night. Most parking lots are empty for a significant period of the time. The first thing we would say is why not, if you are already going to upgrade the fixture, think about controls. One thing you could do to reduce the output, say, from midnight to six am. I’m not saying going off, just go to a low output setting. The IES which is the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America, the lighting trade group from the US that makes recommendations, has new guidance on what the lighting levels should be in a parking lot or parking structure that they consider unoccupied or inactive, meaning there are no people in there at that point. They’re saying “here’s how you can reduce the light levels to this point.” There is great guidance out there. 

Daylighting based – this is pretty easy. Turn off the lights in the day; turn them on in the evening. One of the limitations of a photocell is that its cell has a life and overtime can corrode or die and so that’s when we end up with the day burners.  You need to curtail any day-burning when possible. Other things to know about daylighting based controls is that they can easily be coupled now with time based controls or motion based controls. We’re seeing a lot of manufacturers who sell combined occupancy sensors and daylight sensors. 

We’re going to talk a little bit more about motion based sensors because that’s probably where you are going to see most of your energy savings. It’s a great way to tie it in to the occupancy. Definitely people get a little concerned when they go into a parking lot and the light levels are a bit lower. The idea with a motion based one is that the light levels would increase when there are people there and then after a period of inactivity they would go down. I showed you a range of motion based technologies but for today were going to focus on infrared, image based, and Bluetooth. 

This is a daily chart of August about four years ago – the US Department of Labor in Washington Dc. It’s the output over a period of time of a parking garage fixture with a ten minute delay. I like the graphic because it shows you a really good typical operation during the day. They have a security patrol at night so that’s why you see those little blips in the middle of the night. Then around 6 am to about 8 am, you see a lot of people coming in and out so that’s why there are those vertical bars. Then you have the work period. Then about 6 pm most of the Federal office workers leave and in the evening period, from 6pm to midnight, there is not a lot of occupancy.  That’s why they’re in a low state. This allows you to save energy because lighting is based on the use of the space and with predictable facilities you can save more energy.

This is a breakdown of what the energy savings, of the portion of the time the lights were at a 10 minute delay and were at their different settings on a given weekday. So starting at the left was Monday and on the right is the weekend. You’ll see that currently if your parking lot or parking structure is lighting at a full output all weekend long - most federal facilities have low weekend occupancy and therefore when you go to an occupancy based sensor, for instance the Department of Labor, their fixtures were only in the full output state about 10 to 15 percent of the time all weekend long. Well, that is a significant energy savings just there just by focusing on two of the seven days a week. Obviously you can also tie that into the other days of the week because occupancy patterns are somewhat logical.

One of the limitations of occupancy sensors, especially in a parking lot (and were working on this), is sensor pattern. Right now I would caution you to be careful with infrared occupancy sensors in a parking lot. This is a diagram of what the sensor pattern of one typical parking lot was. You can see that the circles essentially show what the infrared occupancy sensor could see. So the problem here was that the lights would go to a low setting, not off, just go to a low output setting, someone would leave the facility and the lights wouldn’t be triggered because they had not entered one of those pools.  As an industry for parking lots and also in parking structures we’ve seen a lot of people also explore – we’ll continue with infrared for parking structure for a little more, then we’ll talk about video based.

This is a parking structure; it’s using infrared occupancy sensors. These can be stand alone or in a mesh network. You typically need one sensor per fixture. These save energy. A meshed network is a wireless network where the fixtures all talk to each other. The value there is that it allows you to change the output across your parking structure rather quickly. In a standalone system if you had 200 fixtures then any time you want to change from let’s say a 10 minute timeout to a 12 minute time out, you have to send a commissioning agent to change each fixture and that throws into some of your costs. I always encourage when possible networks you can definitely use them securely. It also provides some analytics that you can use. 

The industry has lowered costs in terms of digital technology with cameras. We’ve seen kind of an increase in video based or image based occupancy sensors. Why that is interesting is that you can tie them in with security systems. You can also tie them into parking revenue and enforcement. If you rent spots in your parking lots or structure you can use the camera for license plate recognition therefore you don’t have to have another gate or parking attendants because you are capturing who’s in what spot when and you can charge them directly. It obviously saves energy. One of the advantages, or disadvantages depending on how you interpret it, is that a camera is roughly going to see 1 camera for every 4 spaces. That has some cost implications so that is something you have to think about. One of the benefits if you have a parking facility for the general public where they may not be able to find available parking spaces often is you can use wayfinding. The image on the left shows you a string of green red green images. The idea there is that when there is a green light it shows that there are a couple of open spaces right by that fixture. When it is red, they are all occupied. It works great in parking structures and this example is specifically for a parking structure but video technology is also being deployed in parking lots as well. Working very similarity, the wayfinding we’re seeing now being done with apps in mobile devices but you can do that as well.

We’re also seeing non video based occupancy sensors. This is an example of a site in Pentagon Row Virginia. It uses Bluetooth. It is mounted on the parking surface the car drives over it and blocks the signal. The advantage, or disadvantage depending on what you think, is you roughly need one sensor per parking spot. There is a battery life issue that you need to think about possibly you could do it with photovoltaic or something else. It also works in a parking lot or parking structure. It is a somewhat simplistic idea of something drives over the sensor and that tells you the spot is occupied. This is a different technology that you may want to consider.  

This graph in my opinion sums it all up right here. Your existing lighting usage is in the first column. By switching to new technology you can easily make a 40 to 50% energy efficiency gain. When you add in controls to that new technology you can easily get up to 85% energy saving s when you couple those together. In the LEEP Campaign (I’m going to show these results shortly), you will see many facilities and adjacent federal facilities that have achieved similar results. 

As I mentioned it’s a joint program by a number of organizations in the United States. It only focuses on parking lots and parking structures. There is some technical support available through it where the people who do the technical support can answer questions about lighting choices, technologies, and basic design considerations. 

Now I’m going to highlight some of the winners in the first two rounds of the LEEP Campaign. These are all Federal facilities that either own their parking lots and structures or places where the Federal facilities probably is a tenant and the commercial entity participated. One is the Army Reserve 63rd Regional Support Command. They’re based in Little Rock. They have reserve bases that they help support in a variety of places in the Midwest and the southern mid-west. What important here is that they had a pretty good economic story of savings to investment ratio of 2.54. They were able to save – the example here is one highlighted parking lot where they saved 85% of the existing energy through a conversion from metal halide technology to reduced wattage LED fixtures. 

Going to another extreme of the country, you have Fairbanks Alaska. It’s about 100,000 sq. ft. parking structure. I think this photo is really cool with the reflective material; I always like looking at it. They had a payback in the roughly less than ten years. They were able to save 74% of the energy compared to what they were previously doing. 

Quantico, Virginia, again is the Marine Corp Base that I have mentioned on and off. I showed you this picture earlier and I told you they had significant energy savings. They had 85% energy savings. This is at one parking lot.  They did over 100 parking lots on base and they were able to save significant energy savings when you cumulatively add up all those parking lots on base. 

The Marines on the other side of the country, not to be outdone by the counterparts on the east coast, at Camp Pendleton did about 110 or 120 different parking lots at their camp. They were able to save over 50,000 kWh or 91% of the energy they were previously using when they upgraded. This was one parking lot. On average, across all 100 parking lots on base was about 60% energy savings. Not every parking lot is eligible for the unique situation that allows that level of energy savings but it is significant what they did. 

An IRS facility in the mid-west, this is technically not owned by the IRS but they are a client for the commercial owner. It is about 1.3 million square feet. They couple this with controls and new technology; they went from metal halide to florescent. They saved almost 80% energy savings at nearly 2 million kWh per year at this one parking facility alone. 

Then we move into the National Cancer Institute. This is again a situation where you have a Federal client and they have a relationship with a commercial developer. This is their parking structure and they’re saving 84% energy. This is new construction compared to what they could have done. Again, they coupled it with lighting controls and a very high efficiency technology.

Finally ending again in the mid-Atlantic, the Potomac Yard, this is a place where a Federal client is a majority client in a commercial building. They were able to save about 80% energy savings in this parking structure or about 1.3 million kWh by converting from metal halide to LEDs.

As I mentioned earlier, the LEEP Campaign itself has resources. It provides technical support. This is a screen shot of the LEEP Campaign for Federal users. I’ll share the URL for it in a second. We have a whole section of the LEEP Campaign set aside for Federal uses to help answer questions, to help point out certain resources, and offer other assistance. 

One of the other things I would like to quickly highlight. One of the things the LEEP Campaign has is a database that you can sort. It is Excel based. It is of lighting incentives in the United States for parking lots and parking structures. This one hasn’t been added, it was just recently published and you will see it effective in a couple of days.  This is Pepco, why I like highlighting it is if you look at parking lot and parking structure incentives, depending on what you are doing and what criteria you fall in, you can easily have a parking garage fixture with a 50 watt reduction – $100 to $350 per fixture. If you got a 250 watt reduction it could be as much as $175 to $350. My point is there is a lot of money on the table. The money on the table is now; it may not be there in a couple of years. It is a great way to find resources that are specifically for parking. This way you don’t have to go through a huge list that is talking about other things. This way it allows you to scale unto one technology.

FEMP manages other resources and has a web page with other resources just for outdoor lighting. Where they provide links to a lot of the documents that I’ve shown as well as more information about LEDs and other new high efficiency technologies where you might have heard something about one type of metric or you are concerned that you don’t know this manufacturer and they are claiming wild things. There are definitely resources here there that can help point you in the right direction. 

Then we ultimately have a list of all the URLs that I have briefly touched on and the end of my presentation.

Linda Sandahl:
Great thank you Michael, that wraps up our webinar. Again we will have a pdf of the presentation as well as the video available within the next couple of weeks. So, thank you everybody. Thanks to our presenter, Michael Myer, and thanks to everybody who was on today. This webcast was brought to you by the US Department of Energy Federal Energy Management Program and we thank you all for participating.