Earlier this week, I spent a morning on a job-site at a local school district in the Kansas City area with Danny Seymour, construction manager, and Mike Eckard, project manager, from ConEd Solutions, an ESCO (energy-service company company) based in Overland Park, Kan. Not too long ago, ConEd Solutions did a lighting retrofit (along with replacing chillers, roofs and managing some other infrastructure work) for the elementary, middle school and high school facilities for the Piper School District that had helped the district save $70,834 annually in electrical costs and $185,667 in non- electrical costs.
The interesting thing to me on the lighting retrofit is that most of the lamps were either T-5 lamps or compact fluorescents for interior lighting, and T-5 fluorescents for the parking lots. Danny and Mike said no LEDs were considered because they are years away from penciling out in a bid compared to these conventional lighting products for this sort of job. ConEd Solutions does use them occasionally for high-maintenance cost areas such as parking lots, high ceilings in industrial facilities.
Another interesting element of the Piper School District job is that because of all the cost savings from the ConEd Solutions facility retrofit, Steve Adams, Piper's superintendent of schools was able to convince the school board to install an all-weather football field (FieldTurf) & track to replace a much older field. An added bonus -- When Piper's teams are not using the field, the school district rents it out to local soccer and football teams and a women's professional football team.
Look for upcoming article in Electrical Wholesaling about ConEd Solutions and the interesting role it plays in the electrical construction market.
About the Author
Jim Lucy Blog
Chief Editor
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.