The James V. Forrestal Building in Washington, D.C., encompasses nearly 1.7 million square feet of office space across four buildings, houses the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and is owned by the General Services Administration. In April 2016, DOE selected ADI Energy, a small-business enterprise energy services company (ESCO) to develop and implement a LED lighting upgrade project using the Energy Savings Performance Contract (ESPC) ENABLE program. ESPC ENABLE is designed to permit a standardized and streamlined procurement process for small federal projects to install energy conservation measures (ECMs) in six months or less.
The $2.3 million project investment was self-funding in less than 12 years—a requirement of DOE given the projected plans for the building. The project resulted in improved efficiency of the lighting system, standardized equipment and streamlined operations and maintenance for the building. A previous ESPC project implemented other cost-effective ECMs several years prior to this project but did not address lighting due to the presence of then fairly efficient T8 lamps; the subsequent decrease in the price of LED lighting made it possible to achieve additional energy savings. By implementing this as a single-ECM project, it was bid on the basis of unit-cost pricing ($/installed fixture) to help achieve best value and competitive pricing for the DOE project.
Project Highlights
Goals of the ESPC ENABLE Forrestal Building project included decreasing the energy use intensity, with a simple payback of less than 10 years. Lighting energy usage comprises approximately 15% to 20% of electric consumption in typical commercial office buildings [1]; implementing lighting upgrades had the potential to achieve these goals. This project addressed more than 30,000 fixtures and reduced lighting energy consumption by 50%.
After evaluating several options, tubular LED lamps were selected to achieve the desired energy reduction without the cost of replacing the fixture with a LED retrofit kit. ADI Energy completed the installation in six months during off-hours to avoid disrupting the building occupants.
This project demonstrated that facilities that previously implemented an ESPC project can still achieve additional energy savings by implementing cost-effective ECMs due to decreases in costs and improved technologies, such as with LED lighting when compared to T8 lighting. Additionally, single-ECM projects can use competitive bidding based on installed unit costs (e.g. cost per installed fixture).
Impacts
This project resulted in nearly 2 million kWh of energy reduction from upgrading the lighting system at the 40-year old Forrestal Building and improving the light quality and standardizing the lamps at the facility.
This project is expected to provide estimated annual savings and benefits of:
- $214,000 avoided in utility expenditures
- 6,667 MMBtu
- 1,523 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent prevented (equivalent to removing 293 cars from the road [2]
- 16.5 job years created [3].
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