Advanced Lighting Controls Testbed In San Francisco
Advanced Lighting Controls Testbed In San Francisco
First-generation lighting controls reduce lighting energy use significantly, but lack intelligent control features and prove difficult to calibrate and commission.
The Phillip Burton Federal Building, the second largest building in San Francisco, has become a testbed for the next generation of lighting control systems. To accomplish the project's objectives, the General Services Adminstration (GSA) in partnership with Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) and the US Department of Energy (DOE) through the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), established an unprecedented 18 000 m^2 advanced lighting controls testbed at the building.
Dimmable electronic ballasts, sensors, and control hardware from eight different manufacturers (Thomas Lighting, Motorola Lighting, Advance Transformer, Lutron, Novitas, Unenco, Watt-Stopper and PLC Multipoint) were selected for installation on two floors of the building based on the manufacturers' ability to supply equipment meeting the above project goals. Different bundles of lighting control technologies have been installed, while the one entire floor will serve as a monitored base case.
At the heart of the testbed are distributed, intelligent controllers, "smart panels", that allow precise control of logical zones of lighting fixtures. These controllers are connected to photo sensors, occupancy sensors, energy monitors, and switches, and exchange data over a twisted pair, forming an elaborate information network. By appropriately connecting different control components to the Thomas Matrix 4 000 system and adjusting the firmware, the operation of virtually any type of lighting control system currently available can be simulated.
Since the intelligent controls have been configured to read and record all switch positions and energy monitors, the resolution and quality of data extracted from this site is unequalled. For example, building operators can implement "sweep-off" scheduling control and collect energy data disaggregated at the individual office level, while automatically recording occupant departure and arrival times through the occupant sensor, even though the occupant sensor does not actually control any lights.
Francis Rubinstein
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Fax: +1 510 486 4096
E-mail: rubinsteinf@lbl.gov