light fixture replacements

                  Everywhere you go now most days there is artificial lighting, whether you’re inside or outside, and often times these lights go unnoticed by your everyday activity on campus.  Next time you go into a class room look up and count how many light fixtures are in the room, and then close your eyes and think of how many rooms like the one you are sitting in are on campus, hundreds maybe thousands of rooms all over campus.  It is sometimes mind blowing how much energy we use so nonchalantly. 

                  This has been a note of the UGA Office of Sustainability and Physical Plant for some time now.  They have worked tirelessly over the past few years analyzing different rooms on campus for their energy usage and lighting.  In order to mitigate light waste and energy waste on campus the Physical Plant has been removing and replacing old light fixtures on campus with more energy efficient fluorescent light fixtures.  The number of replacements on campus currently is too numerous to count but the Office of Sustainability and the Physical Plant have teamed up to try and tackle the feat of accounting for every fixture replacement. 

                  The reason behind this project of recording light infrastructure change is to catalog the mitigation of energy use for the purpose of tax rebates.  GA Power is offering rebates for every watt of energy we don’t use any more and replacing light fixtures is a good place to start.  There have not been any early projections on the amount of rebates we will receive but the Office of Sustainability and Physical Plant still remain confident that this will contribute to a large chunk in our multimillion dollar electric bill every year.