Shedding Some Light on Sustainability

You don’t have to invest a fortune to reduce your carbon footprint. In fact, small facility investments, like changing out your building’s lighting ballasts and replacing energy hogging bulbs with compact fluorescents, make a big difference. Lighting ballasts are a component of the lighting circuit intended to limit the flow of current through the fixture. When old ballasts are replaced with newer more efficient versions, the building’s overall electricity use drops dramatically.

The purple line in the graph below plots NOLS Rocky Mountain month-by-month kwh consumption for 2005. From July- September 2007 the old lighting ballasts were replaced with a more efficient version, contributing to a 17, 516 kwh reduction for the year 2007 and decreasing the buildings carbon emissions by almost 8 tons. However, the lighting ballasts relatively hidden location often translates into a lack of appreciation.
In the winter of 2007, NOLS Rocky Mountain received a Blue Sky Grant from Rocky Mountain Power to install a solar array on the roof of their facility. Solar panels, being the more exciting and visible facility addition, receive a majority of the attention. In the fall of 2007, the solar array was installed, mitigating the facilities energy consumption by 27,493 kwh in 2008 and reducing their carbon emissions by 12 tons.
While the energy generated by solar panels is impressive, one of the more important pieces of data in the graph is the dramatic reduction achieved through a simple lighting update. A change that is accessible to almost everyone at a reasonable cost, resulting in carbon reductions comparable to a large solar array.

For more information you can contact [email protected] and check out http://nols.blogs.com/nols_news/2009/03/getting-a-grip-on-sustainability.html
for more ideas on how to reduce your consumption.