Special Report: 11.13.2009

Posted by TED Magazine on Wednesday, November 11, 2009

MISC. STUFF FROM THE ENERGY MEETING

Clean-up from my notebook(s).

By Joe Salimando

Here are a few more things I learned at the World Energy Engineering Congress (the three previous blogs covered specifics from this Nov. 4-6 event, held in Washington, D.C.):

1. I attended a vendor briefing on the show floor by Cisco Systems. I had listened to a Cisco presentation years ago, at BuilConn; I'm not certain, but that might have been 2004 or 2005. I'm also not certain about this, but I could swear that the presentation I sat through in 2009 didn't differ in all that many respects from the one I sat through earlier. Is that a good thing?

2. I went by the Gexpro booth, said hello to the folks. How are things? Motors are a biggie, I was told.

3. Graybar also had a booth. The guy in the booth when I passed by was from Hubbell Lighting.

4. If you've been keeping score at home, in addition to the "smart building systems" distributor, there were four electrical distributors on the WEEC show floor, with their booths. Photos of all four (Capital Lighting & Supply, Gexpro, Graybar & WESCO) appeared here.

5 I went to an on-the-show-floor presentation from Capstone. I discovered that the company is no longer Capstone Microturbine (selling those refrigerator-sized thingies that could fit in your basement). It now sells BIG units; if you chain up five of the larger (200 kW) things, you get a 1 mW installation from Capstone.

 

Toyota's Approach to Lighting

Brad Reed, and assistant project manager and facility engineer for Toyota, discussed the company's approach to lighting. Brad is no youngster, and he spoke about Toyota's plant history and lighting in the U.S. going back to 1992 . . . as if he'd been there for the whole thing.

By happenstance, I sat next to Reed earlier in the conference, in a session (the presenter shall remain nameless) that was full of all kinds of non-specific . . . well, baloney. I was put off by this kind of talk ("we've got to save my grandchildren") -- and so, it appeared, was Reed. From this, and from sitting through Reed's presentation, I will generalize to say that there are AT LEAST two types of people interested in talking in front of a crowd about energy efficiency:

a. Those who don't care to get into specifics and show slides of polar bears.

b. The other kind.

Reed was the other kind. He detailed several lighting moves Toyota has made (over the past 17 years). The most interesting piece was where he talked about the fact that he and other engineers at the company had "learned a lot about how the eye sees." He talked about the difference between Scotopic and Photopic -- and about the fact that this kind of discussion was not recognized by the lighting authorities (i.e., IESNA), at least not yet.

Why get into this? Toyota wants to both save energy AND provide quality lighting on the factory floor. Saving energy isn't enough. At one point, Reed noted, the lighting in the factories was bad enough that some workers went home with headaches. At one location, the lighting was so bright that the workers wore sunglasses (yes, inside a building).

Here's one of his slides on this:

If you do your thinking -- and lighting calculations -- like this, Reed said, you aren't going to be able to measure the real-world results with a standard lumen meter ("it doesn't tell you the full story"). You need an extra-sooper-dooper light meter, which is damn expensive. The Toyota facilities folKs tested lighting of 4100K, 5000K, 6100K, and even 6500K -- before settling on 5000K lamps. This test wasn't bull; at each of the company's U.S. factories, they scoped out an 8,000-sq.-ft. area and tested the new lighting there first.

The result: Not just more energy-efficient lighting, Reed said, but "the team members [the workers] were thrilled!"  Hey, if I could leave my sunglasses in the car when I went to work and didn't have to go home with a headache every day, I'd be pretty close to thrilled, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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