Green Lighting Systems Help Home Depot Slash Energy Costs
During the past six years, Home Depot, Atlanta, Ga., has reduced its U.S. stores' energy per square foot consumption by 16 percent. At the start of 2004, The Home Depot's energy usage was 25 kWh per square foot. Through a series of operational programs including the upgrading of store HVAC systems, aligning of stocking hours more closely with store operating hours, use of CFL bulbs and a switch to T5 lighting, the company's U.S. store energy usage now stands at 21 kWh per square foot.
Moving forward, Home Depot believes it can reach 20 kWh per square foot of energy usage by 2015. The stores will continue to gain operational and energy efficiencies through a move from 54W to 49W lighting, additional HVAC upgrades, installation of more white roofs and certain locations that have shifted their stocking hours to align more closely with our store operating hours. All of these efforts, representing an additional reduction of approximately five percent from the current usage amounts, will bring the total reduction since 2004 to 20 percent. Details
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Jim Lucy Blog
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Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.