Introduction
By upgrading lighting components to more efficient and advanced technologies, lighting retrofits can greatly reduce energy consumption and lower energy bills while maintaining lighting levels and quality. These new technologies often have better lighting-quality characteristics, such as improved color, reduced flicker and greater light output for a given energy input. Improvements in lighting technologies can also lead to increased lifetimes for components that will reduce failures and frequency of maintenance activities.
Consuming less electricity will also aid to reduce the demand and associated emissions from “off-site” power generation. Facilities that are served by photo-voltaic or other green-power systems can experience complementary benefits from these upgrades since the reduction in demand will make these alternative power systems more economically and technically feasible.
The case for replacing existing T12 bulbs and magnetic ballasts with new T8 bulbs and electronic ballasts will be presented here. A general overview of this retrofit is provided along with a spreadsheet designed to calculate the economic viability of this energy conservation measure for a user-defined scenario.