Case Study: BioCity Nottingham

BioCity Nottingham is one of two business incubators in the UK that cultivates over 80 fast growing businesses within the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors. A community with a goal of turning new ideas into commercial success and keen to adopt LED lighting in the interest of energy saving and improved working conditions.

Colin Whitelock’s role as Building Engineer is to manage the facility that enables his bio business tenants to thrive. The three multi-story buildings accommodate laboratories and offices from a small two desk unit to a 3000 sq ft open floor work space. A £50,000 monthly electricity bill was a sizeable target for cost-saving initiatives. Lighting was identified as 20% of the overhead and there was an additional expenditure on maintaining the fluorescent tubes in louvered units across the site. The benefits of LED seemed clear and their suitability was measured in terms of pay-back period.

“The trigger to act was based upon a reduction in the number of luminaires together with the shortened length of payback time,” comments Whitelock, “Once LED units were shown to cover their cost in a period of 71 weeks – we became confident of making the switch.”

Bio-City specified Integral LED panel units for the refurbishment. The UK manufacturer offered panels that delivered 3060 lumens for 33W of power, replacing the 70W that was required to drive the original strip light luminaires. Effectively a laboratory that originally needed 70 fluorescent grid units was refurbished with 26 LED panels which maintained and often bettered the light output provided by the original scheme. In a typical refit, electricity consumption dropped from 5040W to 858W and the cost benefits had an immediate impact.

“The introduction of Integral LED lighting has played a significant part in reducing the weekly electrical consumption on site by 20,000KWh, which is saving £86,600.00 per year on our electricity bills” says Whitelock.