Daylighting - A Simple Solution to Reducing Everyone's Carbon Footprint

Could an answer to our growing climate crisis and failing electrical infrastructure simply be daylighting? Properly designed, high performance daylighting measures can play a major roll in reducing America’s peak electrical load demand by replacing electrical lighting with daylighting for approximately 70% of daylight hours. According to John McHugh, former research Mechanical Engineer with the Heschong-Mahone Group and pioneer in daylighting sciences, if America were to retrofit all existing buildings that make sense to daylight with high performance skylights, the reduced peak load is worth approximately 20,000 Megawatts. That is equal to output of 40 average size 500 megawatt coal fire electric plants.

How can electrical energy from lighting damage the environment? Well, here’s how. Each day, your local power plant will commonly burn coal, oil, and gas to generate electricity for your lighting system as well as for your other electrical needs. While burning these fossil fuels produces a readily available and instantaneous supply of electricity, it also generates air pollutants: carbon dioxide (CO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and nitrogen oxides (NOx). Each of these pollutants causes environmental damage. Carbon dioxide (CO2) causes global warming, sulfur dioxide (SO2) causes acid rain, and nitrogen oxides (NOx) cause both acid rain and smog. Reducing the energy equivalent of only one 500 Megawatt power plant will help to decrease air pollution and environmental damage by the following amounts each year:

- 750,000,000 pounds of Carbon Dioxide

- 1,250,000,000 grams of Sulfur Dioxide

- 3,400,000,000 grams of Nitrogen Oxides

By removing those quantities of pollutants from the air, reducing the energy equivalent of a single 500 Megawatt power plant will have the same affect on the environment as: 

- Planting 91,743 Acres of Trees

- Removing 70,822 cars from the road each year or

- Saving 45,454,545 gallons of gasoline each year

Considering that Jon McHugh reports that the opportunity in America is equivalent to 40, 500 megawatt fossil full burning electrical plants, the impact that daylighting can have is substantial. Sometimes we have a tendency to only look at the bottom line opportunity through daylighting as it relates to energy savings. However, when you look at what that impact is can have on the environment as well as the reduction to our over taxed U.S. electrical grid, daylighting just could be a simple solution to substantially reducing world wide carbon emissions and brown outs across the country. After all, there’s no greater efficiency than off!