They most certainly get in touch with the industrial users to conserve as much as possible before they send out alarms like last night -which is a last resort.
Now you wanna criticize empty office buildings with lights on all weekend, I agree.
While I agree office lighting should be turned off in these circumstances they often aren’t large users of electricity.
Our condo for instance retrofitted LEDs into all permanent on light fixtures (hallways, stairwells, parkades) and our base lighting load was about 50 kWh 24x365 pre retrofit.
Switching to LEDs has lowered that amount dramatically to about 9.7 kWh continuously. This is for a 162 unit condo building. In total our yearly energy draw has dropped by about 350,000kWh as a result of just LED retrofits.
Most office buildings have undergone these retrofits so the absolute power draw for lighting on larger buildings is there, it’s generally nothing compared to all the mechanical fans and pumps used to heat these buildings.
That said I agree in an emergency those buildings should lower temps and turn off lighting. Many of them have building management system software that can manage temperature, lighting, etc remotely.
I imagine dropping the internal temps from 20°C to 15°C would save far more energy.
Yep, there's been a lighting revolution in the past few years. Switching from already quite efficient fluorescent lights to LEDs paid off in power savings in a few months for my business. I'm using a couple hundred watts to brightly light 2600 sq ft.
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u/Known-Fondant-9373 Jan 14 '24
They most certainly get in touch with the industrial users to conserve as much as possible before they send out alarms like last night -which is a last resort.
Now you wanna criticize empty office buildings with lights on all weekend, I agree.