King’s Plaza shopping center on the corner of 41st Avenue and Capitola road did that with their recent conversion to LED lighting.

The lots eighteen 250 Watt (HPS) High Pressure Sodium (the yellowish street and area lights commonly seen) lights were replaced with 150 W LED lights. This saves 1,800 Watts or 1.8kW/ hour of operation for the lot.   The U.S. Energy Information Agency calculations each kWh of electricity saved keeps between 1.22 and 2.19 lbs of CO2 from being released.  For an average 12 hours of operation the lot is saving 21.6kW of electricity and approximately 26 lbs of CO2 with this conversion.

Church street Santa Cruz,Ca

The lights are from RAB lighting.  The most notable thing about the lights are that they do not have the array of LEDs typically seen on LED roadway and area luminaires. Nor do they have the presence detection sensor seen on other lights like the Church street lights or the photocell seen on the top of other outdoor lights. These lights are all controlled by a timer.

In this design the LEDs are the yellow areas tucked up in the back of the light. We’ve seen this style of light in other areas along 41st Avenue. This style works by collecting and reflecting the light rather than the direct illumination in the array style light.

The RAB light model is ALED3T150  (These are some of the specifications used to compare them to other area lights)

• Specs:  -5000K color temperature – tends toward whiter light.  This was discussed in earlier posts.
• CRI 65
• Dark Sky Compliant     
  
• IESNA – TM-15-11 BUG rating B1-G2-U0
• Mounted on 35 foot poles
• Type III light distribution as defined by IESNA.  The type III light distribution throws the light wide and deep as seen in the top photo.
• 12,526 lumens (the total amount of light)
• 80.8 lm/W (lumens per watt) which is the efficacy of the light or how effectively it converts electricity (W) into light (lm) lumens.

The Color Rendering Index of 65 works well enough for a parking lot.  In this photo taken with only the parking lot lighting the colors are well rendered enough to discriminate between different colored cars. Note the vertical lighting ability to clearly illuminate the license plates.

BUG stands for Backlight, Uplight and Glare and the rating numbers assign a ranking to each attribute from 0-5 with 0 being the best or lowest amount of light emitted in that attribute as these are areas in which light is unwanted.

Rebates are available from PG&E for these lights. The rebate for replacing HID exterior area lights with 150-192W LED lighting in rebate code LT001 is $80/ light.

Map

Electrician – Triad Electric Inc. 1438 Chanticleer Ave, Santa Cruz, Ca. 95062 Ph. 831-462-1085

The post Capitola’s King’s Plaza Shopping Center Goes LED appeared first on Santa Cruz LED Resource Guide.

Kings Plaza

Two parking lots along 41st Avenue adopted LED lighting within the past two months bringing the total of LED parking lot lights to 34 out of a total of approximately 550 lights.  This brings the penetration to 6.1%.  The number of LED lights slightly more than doubled since last year.  The lights all look good, are using less electricity, and are costing the owners less to operate.

This is one of the 18 lights installed at the Kings Plaza shopping center on the corner of 41st Avenue and Capitola road.  A more detailed write up of the Kings Plaza lights will be posted on this site soon.

Below is one of the 3 lights installed at the Coast service station at 41st Avenue.

Coast Gas

Several organizations offer assistance in understanding LED Parking Lot specifications and deployment.  The U.S. Department of Energy with the Better Building Alliance at www4.eere.energy.gov has specifications, payback calculators, incentives, demonstration results and links to other helpful sites including the CALiPER Snapshot on Outdoor Area Lighting.   In addition to those practical tools the lighting vendors are bringing out new offerings giving the users a lot of good choices. LED parking lot lights from at least six different vendors are now installed throughout Santa Cruz county.  The Kings Plaza write up is a description of how one vendors lights are deployed.

The post July, 2014 Parking Lot Adoption Rate Update – 41st Avenue Capitola, California appeared first on Santa Cruz LED Resource Guide.

Because of the similarity of technology and proximity to street lights, parking lot lighting seems like a natural next step.

The U.S. Department of Energy, April 2013 report -Adoption of Light-Emitting Diodes in Common Lighting Applications estimatedthat in 2012 there were 44 million street light fixtures in the US and that 1 million had been converted to LEDs. This is a 2% penetration rate, up from 200,000 LED street lights in 2010 for a 4x growth from 2010 to 2012.
The same report states that there are 54 million parking fixtures (38million -garage and 13million -parking lot) and in 2012 600,000 had converted to LEDs for a 1% penetration rate but at a 10x growth rate from 2010 from the 60,000 installed LED lights in 2010.

The parking lot conversion rate was estimated at 200,000 LED out of 13 million total for a penetration rate of 1.5%.

So on the Santa Cruz area.  The first area picked was 41st Avenue in Capitola.  It is 1.8 miles long and with the counties only enclosed mall, two big box stores, three supermarkets, two hotels and a number of other businesses it is primarily commercial and the busiest commercial street in the area.  It also has some LED street lights installed along it.

The count – there are approximately 550 parking lot lights along 41 Avenue.  This includes the large and small lots, but only those facing 41st Avenue.  For example the mall lights that stretched along Claires and Capitola Avenue were not counted.  The lights in the two covered parking garages were not included in this count.  Almost all of these lights are the shoebox style HID lights, with some architectural lights along the edges and driveways of two of the larger lots.

LED penetration – of the ~550 lights – 16 are LED. For an almost 3% penetration rate.  The 16 lights were installed in 4 different lots.

We will periodically recount the lights and track and publish the adoption rate.

The installed LED luminaires take advantage of the ability of LEDs to be packaged into compact and unique shapes while delivering the energy efficient light.

These lights are located at 1030 41st Avenue, 1071 41st Avenue and 1200-1220 41st avenue.

A technical note on the lights with the large yellow – egg yolk looking spots. All of these styles of white light LED luminaires generate the light from a blue LED.  A yellow phosphor is placed over the blue LED which converts the blue light to look like white light.

Some LEDs are made with the phosphor directly on the LED – the lights at the top are like this so the yellow area is small.  Another way to make the lights is to have the phosphor mounted above the LED – remote phosphor is the term.  This is what you see in the lights with the large yellow areas.

View Larger Map

The post LED Lighting Adoption Rate – Parking Lot Lighting – Baseline Count, 41st Avenue, Capitola, California appeared first on Santa Cruz LED Resource Guide.

The post LED Parking Lot Lighting appeared first on Santa Cruz LED Resource Guide.