February 2019 Lighting Journal
Industrial lighting
30
SCOTTISH PREMIERSHIP Retrofitting LED has been at the heart of staggering energy savings of up to 97% at Volvo’s plant in Motherwell, Scotland. But achieving this – as well as winning a LUX award – has been about much more than just swapping out high-pressure sodium and metal halide lamps for LED By Alan Robson and Liz Hudson
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n 2015, the newly acquired Volvo facility in Motherwell, Scotland targeted its outdated lighting scheme as a key area for CO2 reduction, and called in Carbon Reduction Technology to assist. The move was in part driven by the facility’s managers needing to align themselves with their new owner’s strict environmental policies. But the results would in time go much further than simple box-ticking, as the project would go on to achieve award-winning results, reducing power consumption by almost 3 million kWh per year and setting the bar impressively high for induswww.theilp.org.uk
trial energy efficient lighting. The energy consumed by commercial buildings has doubled in the past 30 years, and is estimated currently to account for approximately one third of all energy consumed globally. Worryingly, from both a financial and environmental perspective, this consumption is set to grow by a further third over the next 20 years. Moreover, when you consider that the majority of buildings that will exist in 2050 have already been built, it becomes only too clear why industries of all shapes and sizes desperately need energy and carbon reduction technology that can be viably retrofit-
ted into pre-existing infrastructure. With the introduction of carbon credit fines and rapidly rising commercial energy tariffs, companies are under heavy financial and ethical pressure to reduce their energy expenditure and carbon emissions. On top of this, obsolete lighting technology (sodium, mercury vapour and so on) accounts for a surprisingly large margin of emissions and financial expenditure in industrial sheds, particularly for facilities which operate around the clock.
THE MOTIVATING FACTOR
This background serves to illustrate just