Recently several members of the National Ready Mix Concrete Association National Resource team had the opportunity to participate in a webinar hosted by the US Department of Energy, entitled “High-Performance Parking Lot Lighting for Federal Facilities.” The focus of the webinar was to discuss the implementation of DOE’s Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP). Exterior lighting applications, such as parking lots and parking structures, offer significant potential for energy savings in the Federal sector and FEMP encourages the use of solid-state lighting (SSL) such as Light Emitting Diodes (LED). The webinar provided attendees with an exterior SSL technology update, an overview of product and application-related support resources available from FEMP, and case studies of exterior SSL applications.

One of the case studies included was the Leavenworth, KS Wal-Mart project completed in 2009. This site is one of Wal-Mart’s pilot LED projects and was scrutinized by Wal-Mart management prior to their recent change in policy which now specifies LED lighting on all new construction projects. You may remember hearing about this project before, as it includes a concrete parking lot.

Of great interest to our industry is the response from surveys of Wal-Mart customers and company representatives with regard to the performance of the LED’s on the concrete pavement vs. a similar asphalt parking lot. According to a DOE report, initial response from customers and Wal-Mart personnel indicate that the luminance of the LED-lit concrete parking lot was acceptable, even though it has significantly lower illuminance than a similar asphalt lot with a traditional 1000W metal halide lighting design. This report can be found at: Sustainable Design for Exterior Lighting Applications. Please take a moment to download and review this document, particularly sections 4.1, 5.1 and 6.1.

What better support could we ask for what we’ve been saying for years – concrete’s lighter color provides better reflectivity and therefore should be taken into consideration when designing exterior light plans!

I felt it important to make you aware of this new information and encourage you to use it to reinforce our industry message to designers and owners. As an industry, we concrete producers should take this opportunity to leverage this third-party information from DOE and, indirectly, from Wal-Mart.

Look for an updated Facts Brochure – PFB1: Luminance, Illuminance and Concrete Pavement here on the website. For further information, contact Dave Sethre at dsethre@ndconcrete.com or Jon Hansen at jhansen@nrmca.org. Dave can also be contacted at 701-371-4497.