Until recently, this tunnel in Stoke-on-Trent, England, had to be regularly closed to change failed lamps, causing disruption to drivers.
Now, those old fluorescent and high-pressure sodium lamps have been replaced by over 600 linear LED luminaires, arranged in unbroken lines. It looks way better, and the lights should last about 10 times as long as the old ones – 20 years instead of two.
The new lights, supplied by Philips, will also use significantly less energy.
To help drivers adjust their vision when entering and leaving the 284-metre tunnel, the lights near the ends are brighter than the ones in the middle, providing 156 cd/m² of light near the exits and >2.0 cd/m² (dimming to >1.5 cd/m² at night) in the middle. They are also dimmed as the day progresses, to match the level of natural light or streetlighting outside the tunnel.
I have reduced my overall maintenance costs, saved a substantial amount of money in energy costs, reduced the carbon footprint and reduced the risks for the operatives’
Paul Diamond, Amey
With a projected life of 20 years, the energy savings and reduced maintenance costs are expected to generate around £850,000 ($1.3 million) of savings.
The work was done by engineering services firm SPIE for Amey, the principal contractor for the Highways Agency. Paul Diamond, tunnel manager for Amey, said that since the installation of the new LED lighting, ‘I have reduced my overall maintenance costs, saved a substantial amount of money in energy costs, reduced the carbon footprint and reduced the risks for the operatives.’
The new system complies with the updated standard BS 5489:2 2008 and is designed to provide better uniformity and colour rendering than the old scheme. Because the lights are in an unbroken linear arrangement, any failures (which are unlikely in any case because of the long life of LED lights) would have little effect on the overall scheme. A point-source installation, on the other hand, can easily fall below minimum lighting levels if just one or two lamps fail.
And because the new system uses LEDs, the lights can also be instantly turned back on after a power failure (unlike high-pressure sodium which needed time to cool down first), are fully dimmable, and work well in low temperatures.
The result of the upgrade project is that the annual energy consumption of the tunnel lighting has been reduced from 660 MWh to 154 MWh, a saving on energy costs of nearly £64,000 ($100,000). The tunnel will also save around £28,000 ($44,000) on maintenance, so the total annual savings will be around £92,000 ($144,000). The predicted savings over the expected 20-year life of the installation are predicted to be nearly £850,000 ($1.3 million).
Novel Energy Lighting supplies the full range of Philips professional, specification, and trade LED products. Contact us to discuss your project needs today: T: 0208-540-8287, E: sales@novelenergylighting.com
Drax power station – Energy efficiency, including LED lighting, means the UK needs fewer of these
The UK is saving billions of pounds a year thanks to the ‘unseen’ benefits of reducing energy demand, according to a new report.
The Association for Decentralised Energy, which represents the combined heat and power industry, says that generating energy locally and using it more efficiently is saving consumers more than £37bn ($56bn) a year, compared to 1980.
The report, which looks at local energy generation and energy efficiency actions such as lighting, says that these measures have helped the UK avoid building 14 new power stations, the equivalent of half the country’s current power generating capacity.
But these benefits are often overlooked because policymakers focus too much on energy supply and not enough on demand, the association said. It’s easier for politicians to implement and evaluate big, centralised measures addressing supply than to grapple with the myriad smaller demand-side measures going on across the country, the report says.
Lighting industry figures have made similar criticisms of the government’s approach to energy, arguing that much more attention needs to be paid to reducing demand, rather than simply increasing capacity and moving to renewable energy.
Last year Lux came up with its own estimates of how capacity could be reduced if low-energy lighting were more widely adopted.
The ADE wants to move the demand side ‘from the margins to the centre stage, making it the primary focus of future policy’.
The association’s director Tim Rotheray said: ‘Actions on the demand side have helped keep Britain’s lights on, making the UK a better place to do business by keeping energy supplies consistent and reliable… Despite these considerable achievements, new energy policy often repeats the same patterns, taking a centralised approach to solving the energy challenge and overlooking the substantial contribution that users and individual actions can make.
‘With a clear, simple policy approach that values these smaller contributions, demand-side services can help consumers do even more to cut waste, improve competitiveness and reduce emissions. By 2020, we could save consumers a further £5.6 billion and make the UK a more attractive place to do business.
‘Adopting the right policy could mean that by 2020 we could save enough power to run the London Underground for 30 years, equivalent to 45 TWh (45 billion units). Further reduction in energy demand will make the UK more secure and enable greater energy independence.’
The UK’s failure to ensure industrial and commercial buildings are comfortable and energy efficient is a ‘scandal’, according to energy charity the National Energy Foundation.
The charity has launched an online knowledge portal and an expert guide, published as an e-book, to combat what it sees as the UK’s failure to produce energy-efficient non-domestic buildings.
‘The failure of many countries to produce buildings that are comfortable with excellent energy performance is a scandal,’ says Liz Reason, trustee at the foundation.
The guide is designed for professionals in the construction and design sectors, including building owners, occupiers and operators. It outlines the requirements of a good-quality, low-energy building, the stakeholders that must be engaged, and ways to reduce energy use and costs.
‘Designing and building low-energy buildings is not difficult; it just needs some basic building physics and a clear, common language for talking meaningfully about energy performance with all those in the building cycle,’ said Reason.
The online platform, Building Performance Exchange, is a portal where non-domestic facility managers and other building professionals can record their experiences, solutions and thoughts on building better, more energy-efficient buildings.
Dr Kerry Mashford, chief executive of the National Energy Foundation, said: ‘Both the e-book and the online facility take a practical and common sense approach and provide a valuable contribution to closing the gap between the expected and actual energy performance in the built environment, as well as the knowledge gap that exists in the sector.’
Retail lighting has come a long way in the last couple of years: LED payback time has shortened and expectations have risen, but end users still have to check for dodgy specs. Kathrine Anker reports:
Every time Lux brings together manufacturers, designers and end users to discuss retail lighting, things have changed dramatically since the last time. It’s not long ago that LED was a prohibitively expensive technology for some, and not good enough for others, but things have moved on pretty far since then.
Our latest retail lighting forum, in association with Microlights, got off to an optimistic start, acknowledging that a lot of education has happened. ‘I think all clients have become discerning,’ said Theo Paradise-Hirst, head of lighting design at NDYLight. ‘They’ve realised that lighting is the absolute key driver to making retail work. There is more knowledge and appreciation of colour rendering and you can have conversations with clients that you’d never have had 10 years ago about the exact colour temperature and materials.’
Adding to the optimism was a consensus that payback time for LED lighting has come down to a level that will please most finance directors. Leases can be short in retail, so a quick return on investment is more important than it is in other sectors. Three to five years appeared to be the accepted threshold for most end users around the table, including those responsible for lighting in Sainsbury’s, Harrods and John Lewis, and they all agreed that we are getting there.
From the suppliers’ perspective, the maturity of the UK lighting market is to blame for the slow climb toward the tipping point. ‘Retailers in the UK have been very switched on for a long time and market prices for conventional technology are very low,’ said John Chamberlin, sales director at Microlights. ‘Because the price point is so low in the traditional lighting market and you’re starting from a very low price point, it’s taken this long for LED solutions to pay back. But that tipping point is gone now – we’re getting under two-year paybacks in some cases.’
Hitting the tipping point where cost is no longer prohibitive means some end users can start to think about using LED luminaires not just as a secondary light source but as the main one, said lighting designer Keith Ware: ‘We’re starting to see more use of LED as the primary light. For the first time, it feels like LED is actually a credible technology, that we can start to talk to our clients about full LED schemes. Retailers are willing to go with it because they are starting to look at the whole life cycle and the payback.’Tipping point aside, payback time still depends on what you’re replacing. Alan Patton, M&E manager at B&Q, said: ‘If you’re replacing T5, they are very good already so the payback time of a retrofit will be five to seven years. You can still get your energy consumption down by switching from T5 to LED, but it’s at a cost.’
Horses for courses
Despite the LED hype, retail estates are still predominantly lit by fluorescent T8 – LEDs make up less than five per cent of fittings in retail stores, according to a recent survey conducted by BRE. And ultimately, as Phil Caton, director of PJC Light Studio, pointed out, the best system is the one that delivers. ‘If you’ve got a high ceiling you’ll struggle to get the same punch from an LED fitting as you’ll get from a metal halide, unless you significantly increase the size of the fitting – and nobody wants to see big, clunky fittings in high-end retail stores,’ Caton said.
He added: ‘We get the feedback that LED doesn’t give the same depth – the quality of light is much flatter, even when you play with contrast ratios. When there are multiple LED sources in a fitting we have the problem of fringing and shadows around the product, and dimming still gives problems with modulations, so LED won’t be the total solution for the foreseeable future.’
Theo Paradise-Hirst added: ‘Over time some LEDs don’t render colours as well. It’s not just the output, sometimes you have to be aware that there might be colour changes. If you go to galleries that are lit with LED, they look great on day one but after a while something
MANAGING PERCEPTIONS
Light levels can get shamefully high in retail and it often falls to designers to argue for a more restrained approach. ‘Competing shops in a beauty hall don’t look at the relative brightness in the room, they just want to have the brightest shop. So light levels go up and up, completely unnecessarily and the products end up looking all bleached out,’ said Maida Hot, managing director of lighting design company GIA Equation. ‘Trying to find a balance that creates a luxurious feel is quite a challenge. Everyone puts in more, just in case.’
Most of the designers taking part in our retail lighting forum had encountered clients with excessive and unnecessary light level demands. ‘It’s all about perception,’ said Keith Ware. ‘When a client says ‘I want 1,000 lx’, that’s not a lighting brief – that’s just a statement. You need to ask, what is the lit effect you’re trying to create?’ Ware told the roundtable that his company, Dalziel and Pow, successfully convinced Primark to bring down the light level in its shops to below 1,000 lx. ‘We arranged a test with a lighting consultant to prove to Primark that they didn’t need 1,500 lx everywhere. You could bring the level down to 800-900 as a general average – of course with higher contrast on the walls and better vertical on the fixtures off the aisles. But we cheated a little bit – when we did the test we reduced the light to the level we wanted before the test started. When they arrived they said: “This level is great, now we need to reduce it.” That nailed it completely, because it made them realise that there are better ways of designing a lighting scheme to a lower lux level if you get the contrast right.’
PHILIPS NEW INSTANTFIT LED TUBE PROVIDES QUICK AND EASY-TO-INSTALL ALTERNATIVE TO FLUORESCENTS
Philips, the global leader in lighting, introduces the new InstantFit LED T8 (TLED) replacement tube that reduces the cost for facilities managers replacing fluorescent tube lighting with energy efficient LED technology. LED tube lamps save up to 50% less energy compared to linear fluorescent tube lighting and require less maintenance due to their long lifetime.
Installers will replace fluorescent tubes within seconds – Philips InstantFit LED tube is compatible with all fluorescent fixtures without re-wiring. Crucially, speed and simplicity in installation mean less business disruption and cost – an average supermarket can now switch to LED lighting in less than 4 days instead of 4 weeks.
LED tubes save up to 50% energy costs on lighting – combined with their long lifetime, Facility Managers can recover their investment in 1-3 years.
Philips has led the way in designing an instantaneous ‘click-to-fit’ LED replacement alternative for linear High Frequency (HF) fluorescent tube lighting with electronic drivers. Currently, installers need to re-wire the driver to replace linear fluorescent tubes with LED tubes. This is due to a wide variety of electronic drivers that exist in fluorescent tube lamps today. The Philips InstantFit LED replacement tube requires no re-wiring as it includes a smart electronic design that is compatible with existing drivers, ballasts and sockets. The result is a dramatic reduction in the time it takes to change from fluorescent to LED tube lighting – from over 20 minutes per fixture to a matter of seconds. “We studied the process for replacing fluorescent tubes with LED technology step by step to tackle those issues that dissuade Facility Managers and installers from making the switch. We found speed and simplicity were key,” said Rene van Schooten, CEO Light Sources and Electronics at Philips Lighting.
Philips estimates that the installed base for fluorescent tube lighting today amounts to 12 billion (lamp) sockets globally. Linear fluorescent HF tube lighting with electronic drivers is one of the most common types of general lighting used in shops, offices and industrial spaces. The opportunity for energy an costs savings is huge. If current fluorescent lighting was replaced by LED tube lamps it would result in savings of EUR 42 billion in energy costs or the equivalent of energy generated by 210 medium sized power plants.
The InstantFit breakthrough is a new milestone in Philips innovation record for the LED tube lamp (TLED) market. More recently, in April 2013 Philips announced the creation of the world’s most energy-efficient lamp suitable for general lighting, unveiling an LED tube replacement prototype that produces a record 200 lumens per watt of high-quality white light (compared with 100lm/W for fluorescent lighting) without compromising on light quality.
Over 35,000 London streetlights are to go LED in a massive ‘invest to save’ project.
Transport for London is to spend close to £11 million installing a central management system and upgrading 35,000 lights to LED by 2016.
Further upgrades will be made over the next 10 years, with most of London’s streetlights to be LED by 2023, as part of a £4 billion investment in the capital’s roads.
Mayor of London Boris Johnson said the project would bring lighting on the London’s roads ‘up to 21st century standards’.
Havard Engineering and CU Phosco – both winners at this year’s Lux Awards – will benefit from the work, with Havard winning a multimillion pound contract for the controls and CU Phosco picked as a preferred supplier for the post-top luminaires.
The controls system will be aligned with traffic flow and road usage, and will reduce maintenance costs by keeping track of light failures.
The programme aims to reduce carbon emissions by around 9,700 tonnes a year, delivering annual savings estimated at £1.85 million. Johnson said: ‘With tens of thousands of lights marking the way on our road network it makes complete sense to focus energy and resources on bringing them up to 21st century standards’.
‘This is the largest investment to modernise street lighting on major roads in our capital’s history and will not only cut carbon emissions and save money but it will also lead to even better and safer roads for Londoners’.
The Carbon Trust offers support and advice for companies that want to implement energy-efficiency schemes. It also runs an accredited supplier scheme. Alongside this it can offer – thanks to a partnership with Siemens Financial Services – structured finance packages which are designed so that savings exceed repayments, following an independent assessment of the energy-saving potential.
Paul Smyth of Salix Finance, which was also represented in the discussion on funding for lighting projects, said that streetlighting and LED lighting is a focus for his clients, with spend on such projects amounting to £7.2m and £5.2m respectively as of year-end 2012/2013. He notes a change of emphasis in chosen lighting solutions, with LED now representing more than half of such solutions due to the cost, lumens per watt and efficiency gains. T5, in comparison, represented 48 per cent of projects in the year ending 2012/13 – for the first time, less than LED equivalents.
He says Salix clients have now delivered £1bn of financial savings for the public sector and the organisation is now launching a new website with an online application process which is designed to be easy-to-use and more case studies and guidance.
‘We find that for every £1 you invest you save £4 over the lifetime of a particular technology,’ he said.
Novel Energy Lighting works with The Carbon Trust, Siemens Financial Services, Salix, and Lombard Green Energy Capital to provide financing to clients wishing to implement upgrade projects. Largest energy savings come from retrofitting T8 Tubes withLED Tubes and LED Panels. Please call us today for advice on financing your LED upgrade project.
Speaking at LuxLive today, Toby Marlow, general manager of sustainable development at Waitrose, revealed that all new Waitrose stores will be lit 100 per cent by LEDs from now on.
Marlow described how the retailer’s Ipswich store has undergone a complete LED refit covering office, retail and warehouse space – resulting in an overall efficacy of just seven watts per square metre, reducing running costs by up to 42 per cent.
‘Moving towards LED has been a step-change in design,’ Marlow said. ‘We can now position light where we want it and make greater use of contrasts. Efficiency and colour rendering has improved dramatically and we’re now up to 130 lumens per watt,’ he told the audience at the event.
Marlow says the redesign is between 40 per cent to 42 per cent more efficient than its equivalent T5 scheme – savings that would not have been possible just a year ago.
LED lighting first got a foothold in refrigerators and freezers, because LEDs work well in the cold, but Marlow said: ‘We’ve gone beyond refrigerators now. Everything in the Ipswich store is lit with LEDs.’
He notes a difference to the in-store ambience thanks to the clear, bright light, but said that some of the best feedback has been customers saying they didn’t notice the difference at all.
LEDs had previously been trialled in a branch of Waitrose in Stratford, but the Ipswich store is the first branch to go completely LED. ‘All new developments will be completely lit with LED and more traditional technology will be phased out,’ added Marlow.
Marlow stressed that it’s important to choose the right luminaires, the right LEDs and the right design. But having said that, Waitrose has had only 33 driver failures from the 35,000 installed. ‘There’s work to do around warranties,’ he warned. ‘But we’re seeing payback in under three years, and in the new store the payback has been under two years. It’s win-win – if you do it properly.’
