Intelligent Lighting Leads to Major Energy Savings and New Operational Efficiencies for a Bottling Customer

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Customer: Bottling plant
Energy Savings: $2.5 million annually
Energy Reduction: 10% average annual decrease in overall energy spend
Cost Savings: $31 million kWh saved annually across all sites
Total Rebates: $1.4 million to offset investment
Average Payback: 2.8 years
Maintenance Savings: $500,000
Installation Environments: Production Line, Warehouse, Office

With bottling plants located across the United States, and with facilities that include a wide range of spaces, from production and packaging areas to warehousing and offices, this beverage company, and Digital Lumens customer, requires a lot of energy.

Lighting in particular can be expensive and challenging to customize, manage, and control.

However, with challenges comes opportunity, as this bottling company realized when it recently set out to replace linear fluorescent lighting and modernize its facility footprint through new intelligent, industrial LED lighting.

Why Digital Lumens

Not all LED lighting is created equal. After a thorough review of the options, including other major manufacturers, Digital Lumens was selected as the system of choice through which to introduce new LED lighting and, more important, lighting-based building intelligence and connected safety solutions. With Digital Lumens intelligent LED luminaires in place, our bottling customer wasn’t only in position to save millions of dollars in lighting-related energy costs – they were also able to instrument their facilities with an expandable, Industrial IoT (IIoT) solution through which additional smart sensors can be easily deployed.

Introducing Intelligence Overhead

Over the next nine months, a mix of Digital Lumens high-bay and linear intelligent LED solutions were deployed in facilities across the United States, spanning a variety of environments, including production, warehouse, and support areas.

Half of those facilities implemented our high-bay DLE intelligent LED luminaire, which features adjustable light bars to meet stringent lighting requirements in areas where the ceiling was not reachable, and also expands lighting control to include Digital Lumens’ award-winning Emergency Management Solution where emergency generation was not available.

While many traditional emergency lighting systems can require expensive, time-consuming, manual testing and discrete record-keeping, Digital Lumens’ automated life safety testing and reporting allow users to:

  • Schedule automated monthly and annual tests
  • Monitor system performance
  • Reliably document the health and status of the emergency lighting system to ensure code-compliant lighting and create simplified, easily-accessible records, all without interrupting operations

With this integrated, Digital Lumens battery backup system, our customer was able to upgrade from a mix of equipment, unreliable testing methods, and inconsistent testing times, to a fully-unified platform that streamlines testing, ensures compliance and helps maintain safe working environments.

Additionally, office spaces were outfitted with Philips EvoKit LED troffer retrofits, with Digital Lumens’ signature intelligence integrated through Digital Light Agents (DLAs) – standalone lighting control sensors that can be added to virtually any third-party LED light luminaire to create and connect to Digital Lumens’ lighting control and software platform.

Our bottling customer now had a series of facilities fully equipped with new, energy-efficient lighting, advanced lighting controls accessible via mobile and desktop applications, and new building intelligence capabilities.

The Results

With Digital Lumens’ networked control and intelligence in place, every facility, and each critical area within those facilities, was able to customize and automate their lighting to meet the task-based, comfort, and safety requirements of their employees. Through this system:

  • Manufacturing and production areas were able to apply advanced occupancy insights to create customized lighting profiles to drive immediate energy savings as well as develop new, databased assessments and identify additional savings opportunities
  • Office areas, which previously operated a 100% “all-on” lighting system switched to intelligent, occupancy-based lighting

As a result, $2.5M in annual savings was generated through occupancy sensing, task tuning, progressive dimming, and, where facilities also featured skylights, daylight harvesting functionality. Thanks to Digital Lumens’ software-based verification and reporting, our bottler also confirmed qualification for $1.4M in total rebates – meaning the total project, across all facilities, averaged a payback of just 2.8 years for a solution that will deliver value, and new operational insights, for years to come.

Beyond The Numbers

With Digital Lumens, bottom-line energy savings are often one of the most obvious benefits, but far from the only advantage provided by instrumenting your facility, site, or enterprise with Intelligence Overhead. What else did our bottling customer achieve with this project?

  • Customized installation design that ensured no maintenance or light loss for 20+ years
  • Performance benchmarking of all Digital Lumens-equipped facilities across the portfolio, to understand how the best-performing facilities achieve optimal energy savings
  • Improved efficiencies and safety within loading areas through heat map-based insights

And, most important, an expandable, customizable IIoT solution that allows for fast, easy deployment of new, sensor-based applications that extend beyond lighting and deliver even greater facility insight.