Hills Plaza Cuts Energy Consumption by 40% in Underground Parking Garage with Wireless Lighting Controls

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Hills Plaza Parking Garage, San Francisco, CA

Hills Plaza Parking Garage

The historic Hills Plaza building, in San Francisco’s South of Market Waterfront District, is home to Google and global architecture and design firm Gensler, among other highprofile companies. When global commercial real estate services company Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) decided to upgrade the lighting in the parking garage, they wanted a solution as forward-thinking as their tenants.

Hills Plaza is a 3.2 acre multi-use complex with two popular restaurants and 64 luxury condominium suites atop the main commercial office building. As such, the 186,000 square-foot, two-level parking area serves occupants with considerably different needs. The building management team had been considering the switch to wireless lighting controls for the garage for several years, but had not found a solution that could meet all of their goals until they discovered the Adura Wireless Lighting Control System.

Goals
The Hills Plaza team had several criteria for the upgrade. They wanted to mitigate rising energy costs, enhance security throughout the parking area, improve lighting control and light levels, enable Automated Demand Response (ADR) and implement more sustainable operating procedures. In keeping with the building’s history of using cutting-edge facility management tools, the management team wanted to use the most advanced lighting control technology available.

Solution
Although retrofitting the 175 existing fixtures with the Adura wireless system was a viable option, the Hills Plaza management team decided to upgrade their 22 year old rusted strip fixtures with new vapor-tight fluorescent fixtures factory-installed with the Adura wireless light controllers. Fixtures installed in critical areas, such as drive intersections, were equipped with occupancy sensors. Once installed and online, only 45 sensors were needed to wirelessly control all 175 lights because each fixture can be programmed to respond to multiple specific occupancy sensors. The control strategies deployed in this garage were occupancy detection, demand response and smart scheduling, all accomplished with the use of dimming. In a vacant condition, light fixtures are at a uniformly dimmed state of 20 percent light output. When the area is occupied, the maximum light output is 80 percent.

Results
The Adura Wireless Lighting Control System has met and surpassed the goals of the Hills Plaza retrofit. The system has saved more than 24,000kWh since being activated in March 2011, representing a total demand savings of 40.5 percent over the old system.