Lights, Camera, Action: How Lighting Controls Can Save Energy

An Exploration of Lighting Controls, Part 1

When thinking about the entire energy bill of your commercial or industrial building, lighting might not seem like the most important system for your attention. But you could be losing a lot of energy-saving potential if you aren’t focusing at least some effort on your lighting controls.

Before we get into the details on how updating lighting controls and upgrading to new technologies can save energy and money, let’s back up and take a look at the energy market as a whole.

Back in December, Green Tech Media published a forward-thinking article on some energy numbers, written by Barry Fischer of Opower. In it, Fischer noted a report that found the U.S. economy wastes 61 percent of its energy each year. With that, energy companies are spending more and more money to encourage customers to be more energy efficient – some $8.3 million to be more precise. The article also notes that with more extreme temperatures hitting major cities across the U.S., the demand for energy continues rising at exponential rates.

In case you were starting to feel totally depressed, there were some bright sides in the article. To start, it noted that new solar energy systems are installed in the U.S. every four minutes, and also talked a bit about the Russian nuclear warheads that have been powering the U.S. grid since 1995.

So that’s the energy climate we’re working with in today’s market. There’s definitely room for improvement on the grand scale, and in our next post, we’ll explore how better lighting controls can help alleviate some of these big problems and maybe even reduce your energy bill in the process.