Customer: Dassault Falcon Jet Corp
Location: Little Ferry, NJ
Facility Size: 172,000 ft2 (15,980 m2)
Installation Size: 65,000 ft2 (6,040 m2)
Operational Schedule: 24 x 7
Installation: Retrofit of 1,000 W, 400 W, and 175 W Metal Halide and T8 Fluorscent
Partner: BPL Carbon Free Solutions, LLC
Aerospace Distribution Center Reduces Lighting-Related Energy by 90% Annually
Dassault Falcon Jet Corp. is a subsidiary of Dassault Aviation (France), the world’s leading aerospace company. Headquartered adjacent to the Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, Dassault Falcon Jet markets and supports the Falcon family of business jets in North and South America. Positioned as the finest aircraft company in the world, Dassault Falcon Jet maintains a progressive approach to excellence and innovation.
The company’s corporate design center in Little Ferry, New Jersey, houses nearly 400 employees across sales, marketing, design, and support. Spanning 172,000 ft2, this location also includes a demonstrator-based Flight Operations department, and a distribution center, which holds a large inventory of Falcon Jet spare parts.
As part of its commitment to serving its customers, Dassault Falcon Jet promotes environmentally aware and efficient operational processes. Recent improvements to the Teterboro Distribution Center include new vertical lift machines, monitors to alert employees to the required date and urgency of orders, and new receiving and distribution conveyors, all designed for more efficient movement of parts throughout the facility. Concurrent with these improvements, the management team searched for a more efficient replacement for the legacy lighting — a combination of metal halides and T8 fluorescents — that were driving up energy and maintenance costs.
Key Project Goals and Challenges
The Teterboro Distribution Center has both high bay and low bay areas covering approximately 65,000 ft2 of the campus. The lighting retrofit project focused on finding a replacement solution that would:
- Maximize energy savings
- Improve light quality
- Illuminate all facility areas — both low bay and high bay
- Minimize maintenance costs
Dassault Falcon Jet worked with energy consultant, BPL Carbon Free Solutions, LLC, to review a variety of lighting alternatives. The facility’s lighting — T8 fluorescents and 1000-Watt, 400-Watt, and 175-Watt metal halides — lacked many key features essential to energy efficient operation, including the ability to easily dim, turn off, or schedule lighting. In addition to excessive energy use, maintenance costs added another 10% to operating costs.
Intelligent LED Lighting Meets Diverse Environment Needs
Familiar with the savings impact of LEDs, Facility Manager James Mosca began testing a variety of LED alternatives, including plain LEDs, LEDs with add-on motion sensors,and intelligent LEDs, to understand the capabilities and energy-savings potential of each. After careful review, Dassault Falcon Jet identified the Digital Lumens Intelligent LED Lighting System as the solution of choice.
“A lot of my job involves trying to save money and improve facility operations, so the biggest goal for this project was to save on electricity. As soon as BPL showed us what we could be saving with intelligent LEDs compared to what we were spending for the metal halides, it was an obvious choice for us,” said Mosca.
Project estimates showed that by converting to the Digital Lumens Intelligent LED Lighting System, with the ability to leverage controls to manage settings and eliminate maintenance costs, the Dassault Falcon Jet facility could reduce their lighting-related costs by 90% annually. Additionally, the variety of luminaire options from Digital Lumens — equipped with adjustable light bars — provided the right amount of light for operations.
“This was a unique project because of the range of activity. Our goal was to provide the facility with a solution that could save the most energy, while also meeting light-level requirements of 30 to 45 footcandles,” explained Jim LaCanna of BPL Carbon Free Solutions, a Digital Lumens Authorized Partner. “Certain areas inside the plant needed more lights to stay on, so scheduling capabilities and the ability to dim the lights based on activity was a critical element of a successful solution for the team.”
Beyond luminaire operation and variety and light output, Mosca was impressed by the control capabilities and easy access to energy use and operational data through LightRules, Digital Lumens’ lighting and energy management software. “When we presented the Digital Lumens system, the controls and ability to program lights was more of a driver than anything else,” said Jim LaCanna. “After seeing the reporting and control capabilities, the team did not want to look anywhere else. It was going to be Digital Lumens. Simple luminaires were not comparable.”
Intelligent Solutions for All Facility Spaces
The first phase of the lighting project focused on replacing the existing luminaires in the high bay warehouse space with Digital Lumens’ high bay intelligent LED luminaires. These low occupancy areas, with racked aisles for pick and pack type functions, have facility personnel entering and exiting at only 30 to 40 seconds at a time. Therefore, when people are not in the aisles, the lights can dim during the day or turn off at night.
After securing the economic and environmental benefits of the new system in high bay spaces, Dassault Falcon Jet needed a suitable lighting replacement for the low bay areas of the facility, previously illuminated with T8 fluorescents and 175-Watt metal halides. Covering roughly 30% of the distribution center, the low bay areas serve quality assurance functions. In this area, employees require high light levels to read barcodes and take pictures of aircraft parts and components. When it was time to pick a lighting solution, they chose Digital Lumens’ LLEs (linear intelligent LED f luminaires) without hesitation.
The combination of these two intelligent luminaires provided the Dassault Falcon Jet Distribution Center with a perfect solution for facility-wide intelligence, giving the facility manager the ability to control all luminaires in all spaces — individually or grouped — through the LightRules platform and track operational patterns and energy usage across the entire facility.
“Having the ability to change the schedules and the light levels anywhere in the facility is very helpful,” explained Mosca. “Also, being able to see the amount of electricity used and pull data to show exactly what these new lights are doing for us is incredible.”
Savings Justify Facility-Wide Control
The project outcomes more than exceeded the Dassault Falcon Jet team’s expectations in both lighting performance and energy savings. Recognizing the value in controls and being able to adjust lighting settings to meet facility needs, the upgrade project delivered compelling results, including:
- 90% reduction in lighting energy usage annually
- $53,691 savings in annual energy costs
- Eliminating maintenance costs, providing an additional $9,251 in annual savings
- Saving 547,868 kWh per year
The movement to intelligent LED lighting gave Dassault Falcon Jet the opportunity to lock in energy and maintenance savings, while also improving lighting output. The result is a better environment for all users of the facility, and new levels of efficiency and control that enable management to optimize lighting to support their goals of excellence across operations.