Articles

Conservationists Want Businesses To See the Light

Cost concerns and ignorance keep firms from using more-efficient fixtures

Evelyn Lee, Staff Writer
March 16, 2007

BIZ SPOTLIGHT - Environmental Planning

Switching to energy-efficient lighting has been touted as an easy way for businesses to save money and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. But despite these benefits, many companies are holding back from upgrading. Energy experts say the reasons include cost concerns and insufficient efforts by the state to promote efficiency.

In the past two years, new improvements to compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs—those swirly-looking bulbs that fit into regular lighting receptacles—have gotten better relative to traditional incandescent lights, according to Keith Hartman, president of Public Energy Solutions, an energy-services company in Englewood.

CFLs now last up to 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs, while producing the same amount of light that traditional incandescent bulbs do, as well as creating less heat, which can raise air conditioning costs in the summer, says Hartman. Each CFL avoids the production of more than 450 pounds of greenhouse-gas emissions over its lifetime, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which, along with the Department of Energy, runs the Energy Star program that rates the efficiency of household products.While a CFL still costs about twice as much as an incandescent bulb, the price has fallen dramatically from the late 1990s when the differential was a factor of 10, according to Hartman.

Wal-Mart has jumped on the CFL bandwagon by pushing to sell at least one such bulb this year to each of its 100 million U.S. customers and replacing the incandescent bulbs in its stores with compact fluorescents. “When you look at the prior history of energy costs to what your new energy costs are going to be, they’re lower,” Hartman says, adding that businesses can save up to 60 percent to 65 percent on their electricity costs with CFLs.

Such savings can beef up a company’s bottom line, notes Jeff Beiter, director of business development for energy-efficient products at Sea Gull Lighting, a lighting-products maker in Riverside. “When you reduce your energy consumption and you reduce your operating costs, you increase your operating income,” says Beiter.

Installation costs for lighting upgrades vary depending on the number of fixtures, Hartman says. Generally, an upgrade for a typical lighting fixture would cost around $50 to $60, while a state rebate through the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities’ Clean Energy Program for the upgrade would range between $10 and $30 a fixture. A business can expect to recoup the cost of the upgrade in one and a half to two years, he says. The use of energy-efficient lighting can also have a significant environmental impact, adds Hartman. “Energy efficiency is directly tied to pollution emissions, because generation of electricity causes pollution emissions,” he says.

Fluorescent lights, including CFLs, are more energy efficient than the standard incandescent bulbs because they don’t use heat to create light. A fluorescent bulb generates electricity through a ballast that excites gas inside the bulb to produce ultraviolet (UV) light. A regular bulb, by contrast, creates light by heating a filament inside the bulb until the filament becomes white-hot, but much of the energy used to create the heat is wasted during the process.

But the EPA says that CFLs can themselves be an environmental concern, because they contain small amounts of mercury, which is a toxic metal that can be released into the environment when fluorescent bulbs are discarded improperly. At the same time, however, CFLs help to reduce mercury emissions, since the highest source of such emissions comes from burning fossil fuels such as coal to produce electricity, according to the agency.

The EPA says that if efficient lighting were used in all locations where it has been shown to save money, it could cut electric use for lighting by 50 percent. This reduction would in turn lower annual carbon dioxide emissions by 202 million metric tons, sulfur dioxide emissions by more than 1.3 million metric tons and nitrogen oxide emissions by 600,000 metric tons. Carbon dioxide is the primary cause of global warming, while sulfur dioxide contributes to acid rain and nitrogen oxides to smog, according to the agency. Yet less than half of New Jersey businesses have upgraded their lighting or other energy systems to make them more efficient, says Hartman, primarily because of the cost.

“Transportation costs, their health care costs, their labor costs,” are all things that might take priority over conservation, says Melanie Willoughby, senior vice president of the New Jersey Business & Industry Association in Trenton.

She also finds that many businesses are uninformed about their lighting options. “We’re in the infancy stages of an education program for the state,” she says. “We have not gotten very far at all in helping to demonstrate to the public how they can be more energy efficient.”

Hartman, who is a member of the Board of Public Utilities’ Clean Energy Council, asserts that the state has not done enough to promote energy efficiency to local businesses. “Incentive levels are just too low to entice customers to make upgrades,” he says.

He says the state has also focused heavily on renewable energy, particularly solar power, rather than energy efficiency. “If you look from a cost analysis standpoint, it [efficency] makes a lot more sesnse.”

Hartman says that he hopes that New Jersey’s Energy Master Plan, which is scheduled for release in draft form later this year and aims to reduce projected energy use by 20 percent while producing 20 percent of the state’s electricity from renewable sources by 2020, will help the state to direct more attention on energy efficiency and create a better balance between efficiency and renewable energy.

“These are things going on right now to try and help with prevention of pollution, but it could be done on a much, much bigger scale,” Hartman says. “We’re only touching the tip of the iceberg.”