Case Study

The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) has more than 1,075 buildings with 137 truck station campuses across the state. MnDOT’s Cedar Avenue truck station, located in Richfield, Minnesota, provides critical roadway snow removal support within the Minneapolis metro area. It includes administrative offices, a training room, and a large breakroom, along with truck maintenance and service facilities.

The focus of this case study is to highlight the strategies used at Cedar Avenue truck station for integrating plug load and lighting systems. An integrated controls pilot project with retrofit installation was conducted from October 2019 to April 2020 and has been recognized by the Integrated Lighting Campaign in the following categories:

  • Integrated Controls for Plug Loads & Lighting Systems
  • Integrated Controls for HVAC & Lighting Systems

In 2022, the City of Chicago finalized one of the largest, most ambitious, street lighting modernization project in the country. In the span of four years, the city replaced more than 280,000 outdated high-pressure sodium (HPS) light fixtures with energy-efficient LED lights, which use less than half the energy of HPS lights and last twice as long. The city also implemented a smart lighting management system powered by a wireless network of nodes attached to each fixture. The nodes send instant outage notifications, automatically creates a repair ticket, and assigns a repair crew to respond to the location of the faulty light. This allows for quicker maintenance and repair.

With a large portfolio of buildings, college campuses present a unique opportunity to adopt connected lighting systems for the benefit of the students, professors, administrative staff, and the public. And that’s just what both California State University, Dominguez Hills (Cal State Dominguez Hills) and the University of Minnesota did. Cal State Dominguez Hills wanted to decrease energy costs at James L. Welch Hall (Cal State), a four-story building housing multiple functions, including administrative and admission offices, classrooms, tech support, server rooms, and a police station. The University of Minnesota had similar goals for Jones Hall (UMN), one of their mixed-use buildings on campus with a combination of offices, classrooms, and public space.

IMEG, a national engineering and design consulting firm, put innovation to the test when designing their new Chicago office. In collaboration with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), IMEG implemented several emerging lighting techniques as part of a study to better understand the physiological and psychological impacts on occupant comfort, well-being, and energy savings.

This case study follows the process and outcome of designing and implementing a new LED lighting system for a leading multi-brand auto dealership in Des Moines, Iowa. This project shows the many capabilities and benefits of an LED lighting and control system when guided by careful lighting design, control system configuration, and utility rebate knowledge.

This is a case study for the Tinker Air Force Base. By replacing the existing lighting with LED fixtures, this project saved more than 60% energy compared to the existing technology. This is consistent with savings of converting either fluorescent or high-intensity discharge fixtures with either new LED fixtures or retrofit kits, which typically result in at least 45% savings. The lighting controls saved between 8-23% compared to the LED baseline. Because LEDs are very efficient, the new LED baseline uses less energy. As a result, the 20%+ savings does not result in sufficient savings for a reasonable payback. However, using lighting controls to control other building systems can make the lighting and control system more cost effective.

Parkway South High School is the largest school and most significant energy consumer in Parkway School District. The school became a prime candidate for a long-term, sustainable solution in 2016 after one of two chillers in its aging chiller plant became non-functional. As part of an energy savings performance contract, a central geothermal plant was installed in addition to building envelope sealing and LED lighting. Installation of a 75 kW solar array and retro-commissioning were also recently completed onsite.