Hi, we're here with Ray Pierotti from La Plata Electric. Ray is a lighting specialist. He is also Mr. LED and I've seen him doing workshops across the State of Colorado. So we truly have an expert with us. Ray, thanks so much for coming in and sharing your wisdom with us. >> Thank you very much. >> Could you talk a little bit about your position and what you do at LPEA? >> Yes, John. I'm a lighting specialist and and Energy Advisor. So my job is to help our members switch to efficient lighting, and in doing that, one of our main goals is to be more energy efficient, help our customers be more energy efficient, and save them money. And by far is the easiest and most effective way for a customer to save energy and save money. This is over other renewable type resources and we call it the low hanging fruit because it's a fast payback especially for commercial customers. Over the past five and a half years, we've given out over 700 commercial rebates. And that includes a million dollars being rebated back to our customers. We've saved over four megawatts of energy savings. And I think the important thing here, when you talk about LEDs, is the long-term effect. Because the compounded savings over that five and a half years is $5 million back to our members. And that's what our board of directors want to see and that's what our members want to see. It's a win-win for everybody. >> So you mentioned LEDs and this is one of the new efficient lighting technologies. Can you compare them to the old lights, the old incandescence that Thomas Edison invented. >> Sure. >> I guess it's Thomas Edison. >> Sure. Well, Edison did a great job and he invented a bulb where when you run energy and electricity through a very thin filament and it is a Tungsten filament. In the old days, it was probably carbon. It creates a resistance, and when you create that resistance, it creates heat. And I call it a heat bulb versus a light bulb. >> [LAUGH] >> Because it's mostly heat, 90% and that's the red part. The white part is the light that it emits. So 90% heat, 10% light, it's not very efficient and that's why and by the way that light bulb, that incandescent light bulb, it gives out ten lumens per watt. All right, in comparison, LEDs of today are giving out anywhere from 80 to 100 lumens per watt, and we're going toward 200 lumens per watt in some types of fixtures and lights. >> We used to buy light bulbs, and a hundred watts meant so much light. But that doesn't seem to be the case. You just mentioned lumens. That's sort of a different deal than watts. So can you expound on that a little bit? What are we really buying here? >> So lumens are a measurement of light. The more lumens, the more light we have. For example, a 100 watt light bulb has approximately 1,600 lumens. And another comparison is 60 watt light bulb has 800 lumens. So when we're looking at light bulbs, we need to make sure we're buying the amount of lumens in an LED That you had in your other type of incandescence. So it's good to know some of those numbers because when we go to a store, a hundred watt light bulb could be a 14 watt bulb, it could be a 18 watt bulb. And the lower the wattage, I call it gas mileage. It's how we measure gas mileage, lumens per watt. So if you can get a 14 watt bulb that gives you 1,600 lumens, then it's better than a 18 watt bulb. So that's something to look at, at the packaging. And I do want to mention that, where do you find this information? And there's a lighting fax label on every single package, that's really important to know. Because everything you need to know about that light bulb, to buy the right bulb is on the package. And that, by law, was put in three years ago. So every package should have it. It's going to show the lumens up at the top, the wattage. It's going to show the life of the bulb. How many years it will last. Many of them were going to say 22 years. It's based upon three hours a day. That's residential usage. All right, it's going to show the color quality, the Kelvin, the color of white I call it. From very warm to very cool and it's also going to show the color rendering index and that's how true the colors are. So these are all things that you look at to make sure you're going to find the right bulb for your application. >> There's a lot of detail in this labelling then, a lot. >> [LAUGH] >> I want to go through a couple pieces of it. First of all, 22 years, so I can't do the calculation in my head. But 3 times 365 is about 1,000, so that's about 22,000 hours? Is that how long these bulbs last? >> Well, that's a good point, because most of your screw-in bulbs today, what might be 25,000 hours. >> 25,000 hours. >> 25,000 hours. But John, what that means, because it's different than all other types of light. Any other type of light in the past, when there was a rated life, for example, an incandescent bulb for 2,000 hours, it means burnout. After 2,000 hours, 50% of those lamps will have burned out. With LEDs, it's all about lumen deprecation. If you buy a good quality LED with good components, and the rate of life is 25,000 hours, that means after that time period, the lumens will have gone down 30%. The bulb should still be running. The bulb should not burn out, a good quality bulb. So that's very important to note. >> In 22 years, I'm going to need more light, not less light, so maybe a 30% depreciation, is a serious thing as we get older. >> And John, you might have heard that in my workshop too, because the older we get, the more light we need. A 25 year old needs half the light of a 70 year old. So it's really important that if you're buying for yourself, to think about how much light I need. But if you're buying for your parents or grandparents, I know I really jack the wattage up, and the lumens up when I buy for my mother. >> [LAUGH] >> So, and I'm starting to jack them up for myself, also. More lumens for me. >> We need a senior discount on lumens, it sounds like to me. >> [LAUGH] >> You mentioned some other things about light quality. Why does that matter? Can you give us an example of maybe a retrofit, or energy plan you've done where the light quality really mattered, and these LEDs gave you the very ability, or the choices to make a difference? >> Okay, all right. I did two energy assessments for galleries this week. And when I went in, LEDs are more of a customization. Because you've got so many more choices in color, in beam angles, in the type of spread of your light, and the different Kelvins and the color of white, so when I go in to see a gallery, we talk about what type of lights you need. What type of application you're going to use it for? How far the light is from your photograph or your art piece? And then we talk about the color of white, I mean, daylight is representative of 4,500 kelvin. By the way, kelvin is a measurement of the warmness, all right. Each one of those boxes on the energy fax label will have the kelvin and how warm it is or how cool it is. So is that like a blue tint versus a reddish tint? Is that where warm and cool come in? >> Yes, and I'm going to start in the middle. Daylight is 4,500 to 5,000 kelvin. What we're used to with incandescent lighting is 2,700 to 2,400 kelvin. And if we do an outside lighting, task lighting or shop lighting. We might have a whiter light that's 5,000 kelvin. So again, what is your application, what is you're going to use it for, and by the way, a lot of this is personal preference because I like the warmest light possible. My boss at La Plata Electric likes it almost blue light, the very white light. So, some of it's personal preference, but also in a commercial situation, it's what looks good on your product. >> Earlier, and you talked about saving people money. How much money does changing to LED bulbs really save? >> I'll give an example of a natural food grocery that changed out all their lighting. It's a very, very big store and they spent a lot of money in order to do this huge switch out. Well, they saved 96,000 kilowatt hours a year. And they're going to save almost $12,000 dollars a year. Because their lights are burning almost 18 hours a day, their payback was much less than a year. >> So they pay off the investment in the new lighting in a year, the bulbs last four or five more years, that's all gravy. >> Yes. >> That's all profit. >> That's all profit especially for commercial businesses. If you want to help your business, the maintenance factor is extremely important. These bulbs can last 25, 50 up to 100,000 hours for bigger fixtures. So they're going to be there for a long time, some time 10, 20 years. So it's important that you pick the right bulb. And it's going to be there for a while. But then again, there's other factors to that also that we haven't talked about. And the UV rays. It's really important for photography, for museums, for fabric shops. I mean, not losing the quality and some of that historic paper that we don't want to lose because of UV rays. >> This is a little off track, but as you choose lighting systems, is there evidence that maybe worker productivity gets better under certain conditions? >> There's a lot of talk about that right now, John. And when I went into our facility, La Plata Electric, and we switched out all our lighting, I chose a 4,000 kelvin, a little bit whiter, not quite to daylight but a little bit lighter. Because that helps increase productivity because it affects the melatonin level, and that effects circadian rhythm. So, and a lot of people want real, real warm, but the fact is, for productivity, for schools, and there has been studies done in schools that are whiter light increase the productivity, keeps kids more alert. So that's very important. >> One of the things that is an issue and the sustainable business class, is a climate change and CO2 emissions. So when you go into a business, are people concerned about the environmental effects, or are there other motivations, mostly, for changing out these lighting systems? >> Okay, when I go in, I'm trying to help people save energy, all right? By saving energy, they're going to save money, all right? Then I bring in the maintenance factor also. But the fact is, everybody also knows underlyingly or in the end that it affects other things like LEDs last 10 times longer. All right, when they last ten times longer, it means less in the landfills. It means less glass, it means less recycling. >> All right, less material to make them, I guess really. >> Exactly, exactly. We preach this all the time about the environmental positive effects of using LEDs. One ton of carbon dioxide can be kept out of the atmosphere by using one only LED, that's huge. So it really does make an environmental impact. >> That is amazing, because an LED is small and a ton of CO2 sounds big, so [LAUGH]. >> It is and again, you're looking at 22 years of burning sometime. And the amount of bulbs that were going to be used in place to that over the 22 years, and the amount of fuel, sometimes fossil fuels that were going to run those 10 or 12 bulbs to replace that one LED. >> We've talked about the A19 bulbs, screw in ones. But in a lot of commercial retail environments, it's these fluorescent bulbs, the four foot long fluorescence with balasts. Do we have equivalents, the energy saving equivalents for those? >> Yes there is, and those old fluorescent tubes use ballast and the way you can do it in a commercial application, especially, is to change the tube out and bypass the ballast. So you're taking the ballast totally out of the equation. Direct wire in the tube. The other way you can do it is buy a whole new fixture. Sometimes buying a fixture's a quality way to do it. It looks great, it looks almost like you're remodeling. >> What else do you see as sort of exciting areas in this whole energy savings, particularly the lighting area? >> Well, John, this is something that's not coming down the road, it's here. But it's being used more and more, and that's the use of controls. After you've put in the LED, you save 75% over the previous lighting. Then what can you do to save more energy? Let's put controls up, put occupancy sensors up, vacancy sensors, motion detectors, daylight harvesting. >> I want to go back to something you mentioned, your peak power. So at night, lights go on, TVs go on, computers were streaming. And so maximum demand, and that's the capacity that the utility, the generating company has to be prepared to supply. >> Right. >> That peak. So if we lower the peak, that means that the generation facilities can support more people, or don't have to be run at an inefficient level or something like that. Is that right? >> They can support more. We can lower the cost and again, that helps the generation T&G, G&T, and it helps the utility because it actually saves us money. And again it's money and power we aren't buying. >> This is great. So let me just summarize a tiny bit. Energy savings, especially with lighting is maybe the lowest of the low hanging fruit, it sounds like to me. And it has ramifications, environmental ramifications, it has light quality, productivity ramifications and even Implications about generation systems. Is that a fair summary? >> That's a great summary. And again, it's something everybody agrees upon, even the solar installers. They put solar in, the first thing they're going to tell the customer is take care of your lighting. You can reduce your load and we can put in less panels. For businesses, it's vital. Because if they want to make more money immediately, they can do that just by changing out their lighting. >> And we know that it only takes one normal person to change a lightbulb, it takes more people with PhDs, but a normal person can do it pretty easily. >> [LAUGH] >> Ray, thanks so much for your time, this has been great. >> Okay, thank you, John, very much. Appreciate it.
