Sustainable Facility - February 2009 - (Page 10) Shedding Light on ENERGY NEW MANHATTAN OFFICE TOWER DEMONSTRATES HOW TO CUT ENERGY USAGE DRAMATICALLY WITH ADVANCED LIGHTING SYSTEM. >> BY MICHAEL JOUANEH office equipment. The federal agency says lighting alone accounts for 44 percent of the typical office building’s electricity consumption (and about 56 percent for educational buildings). But anyone who encounters The New York Times Building, a dazzling 52-story Renzo Piano design in Manhattan, will find this formula turned on its head. Ingenuity and the Times Company’s commitment to sustainability have delivered stunning results in lighting energy efficiency. LIGHTING SYSTEMS At the beginning of the project, after examining the lighting options on the market, the Times Company’s building team began to ask questions and conduct research on how lighting could be accomplished more efficiently. This research led to the Building Technologies Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where, after much discussion, the Times Company began to pursue a dynamic lighting system that would allow departments to set their own light levels and would allow artificial light to be used as a supplement to daylight. In so doing, the team constructed a replica of the southwest corner of the new building and conducted rigorous testing of competing technologies and products to decide which would best meet the building’s lighting needs. Ultimately, the Times Company selected Quantum total light management, designed and manufactured by Lutron Electronics Co., Inc., to control and manage the lighting for its new headquarters. “We designed our building to use 1.28 watts per square foot of lighting power. With ■ “We designed our building to use 1.28 watts per square foot of lighting power. With Quantum, it’s using only 0.38 — that’s 70 percent less,” said Glenn Hughes, director of construction for The New York Times Building. >> Photo by Nic Lehoux. A 10 s the free flow of cash slows for corporate America and the call for green corporate behavior rises, a new Manhattan office tower stands as a stellar example of how companies can build smart to save both money and energy. To reduce America’s appetite for energy consumption, it makes sense to attack the bigF E B R UARY 200 9 gest sources of the problem first. With office buildings and other commercial structures — all ravenous users of electricity — the place to start is the lighting. Go into any office building and, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (the independent statistical and analytical agency within the U.S. Department of Energy), it’s lighting that accounts for the largest source of electricity usage, more than HVAC or S U S TA I N A B L E F A C I L I T Y
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.