Lighting represents the single largest opportunity in a facility for controlling energy costs.  EMCS represents products that improve lighting efficiency and control.  Through these systems, like Square D Power Link, EMCS can help save you money on your energy bills.  Here's how:

Understanding Energy Consumption

Utilities bill their customers in a variety of ways, including an energy use charge, demand charge, power factor charge, fuel adjustment charge and other charges. In this section, we will focus on reducing energy consumption.

Energy Consumption (kWh) = Input Watts (kW) x Time (hours operated in a given year)

To reduce energy consumption, therefore, we can either reduce the input wattage or reduce the hours of operation. Input wattage can be reduced by replacing lamps and ballasts with more-energy-efficient counterparts or outright removal of lamps and ballasts. The hours of operation can be reduced using sophisticated controls and other methods.

Example

Let's look at two purely fictitious lighting systems, A and B. Lighting System A is the existing system and Lighting System B is a proposed retrofit of a lighting control system which simply includes time of day scheduled lighting control.

So we save almost $18,500 per year by ensuring the lights in a medium sized office building (~30,000 sq.ft.) are off when the building is not occupied (14 hours per day and weekends).  Additional energy savings can be calculated from the air conditioning system.  Since the lights are off after hours the air conditioning system no longer has to cool the heat produced by the lights.

Payback and Return On Investment (ROI), now that we know how much money we're going to save while still enjoying comparable performance from the lighting system, it is time to do an economic analysis, which includes determining payback and return on investment (ROI).