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California Campus Highlights Award-Winning Exterior Lighting System 07-24-13 | News

California Campus Highlights Award-Winning Exterior Lighting System

Exterior smart lighting networks not only can save money and energy, they can provide a number of resourceful benefits.

One of the expected missions of our colleges is to be leaders in new technology, ideas and innovations. Proving this to be the case, the University of California, Davis installed a smart lighting network that is saving this Sacramento-area university an estimated 1 million kilowatt hours and $100,000 annually.

The system is so impressive, it received a best practice award at this year's California Higher Education Sustainability Conference (CHESC), in late June.

The adaptive exterior lighting network consists of more than 1,500 dimmable LED luminaires, occupancy sensors and a radio-frequency network control system. According to campus officials, it is exceeding the anticipated kilowatt-hour savings. For instance, the network's wall packs measured 89 percent energy savings in locations that averaged occupancy rates during the night of 20 percent.

Lighting sources all over the campus are interconnected through a wireless mesh network that can then be monitored and controlled by a single interface. This lets the facilities crew easily alter lighting schedules and power output settings to correspond to what is happening on campus on any given night. Light levels can be adjusted in real-time too.

In addition, the interconnectivity of the network allows the system to anticipate a person's or a group's direction and rate of travel and brighten their route in advance.

The UC Davis design, construction, utilities and facilities team was assisted in the project by the California Lighting Technology Center, and the Office of Environmental Stewardship & Sustainability. Lumewave, Philips, and WattStopper were the main product vendors.