It is a small project by almost any objective standard, but the just-completed LED lighting retrofit at NRG Stadium, home to the NFL’s Houston Texans, is big news, underscoring the dramatic changes under way in the commercial/institutional lighting market—changes that threaten to undercut future demand growth in the already slow-growing electric utility sector.
The stadium retrofit, which is scheduled for a national unveiling during the Texans’ Thursday, Oct. 9th home game, the first night game using LED lighting according to NRG, involved replacing the existing lighting system with some 65,000 light emitting diodes. At full power, NRG said, the new lighting array will use 337 kilowatts of electricity—60 percent less than the 842 kilowatts used by the old unit.
And that is why this smallish project is such big news—companies and local and municipal governments around the country are doing exactly the same thing as NRG, they are replacing older, inefficient incandescent lighting with highly efficient and long-lasting LEDs, and along the way they are cutting deeply into future utility electricity sales.
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For Slow Growing
Electric Utility Industry