DOE Releases GATEWAY Report on LED Parking Lot Lighting Demonstration
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has published the report from a demonstration of bi-level LED parking lot lighting at a Raley's Supermarket in West Sacramento, California. This GATEWAY demonstration report, prepared by Pacific Gas & Electric and Energy Solutions, provides an overview of project results including lighting performance, economic performance, and potential energy savings.
In this project, several metal halide (MH) luminaires in the Raley's parking lot were replaced with new LED luminaires from BetaLED incorporating bi-level operation (dim state and full state) controlled by motion detectors.
Key Findings:
• The LED luminaires drew an average of 149 watts on high power and 52 watts on low power, versus 346 watts for the MH luminaires, yielding a time-averaged annual energy savings estimate approaching 70%.
• LED luminaires on both “high” and “low” output delivered improved lighting uniformity over the MH baseline.
• Calculated simple payback periods for bi-level operation LEDs for both new construction and retrofit scenarios were less than five years.
Conclusion:
LED lighting for outdoor parking lots shows great potential for energy savings. This demonstration provides evidence of increased potential savings using bi-level operation luminaires, and further evidence of the improvements in performance of LED luminaires. The costs and savings for this host customer provided favorable payback scenarios for both new construction and retrofit scenarios, due to significant maintenance and energy cost savings. Utility or government incentive programs could also help to encourage greater adoption of LED luminaires for outdoor parking lot applications by reducing the initial investment. These utility incentive programs should require minimum performance standards for qualifying products in order to ensure long-term energy savings.
This report and other reports is available for download at www.ssl.energy.gov/gatewaydemos_results.html. This LED lighting demonstration is one of a number of DOE GATEWAY demonstrations that showcase high-performance LED products for general illumination. To learn more about the GATEWAY program, visit www.ssl.energy.gov/gatewaydemos.html.
