Vote Earth

The purpose of Earth Hour was to allow both individuals and organisations to show their concern about global warming by switching lights off for one hour. Whether the actual power saved during that hour made a real difference is open to debate, but it did focus attention. In the architectural lighting industry, this focus can have an impact. The greatest impact is achieved when a building’s owner, designers and the equipment manufacturers share an understanding of the impact that lighting can have on the environment. The success of such collaboration was illustrated by a lighting installation at Finsbury Avenue Square in London: a large, permanent, in-ground installation of LED-based colour mixing lamps. The owner, Broadgate Estate Ltd, is a founder member of the UK Green Building Council, and was keen to organise a ‘lights-out’ for Earth Hour across all of their estates – including the Finsbury Avenue Square installation. The concept for Finsbury Avenue Square was developed by Mark Ridler of Maurice Brill Lighting Design who called in Artistic Licence to develop, manufacture and install both the lighting and the entire control system. The installation is designed for after dusk, using astronomical time triggering to ensure that illumination starts after sunset. Using astronomical time provides a significant power-saving compared to the rigid time clock triggering seen in so many installations, as it ensures that the lighting is only activated as the ambient light level drops.
Similar opportunities to be carbon-conscious presented themselves during a recent project at the O2 Arena in London where we installed a control system for the exterior features and utility lighting, a project designed by Orri Petursson at Speirs and Major.

In many installations, little or no thought is given to the amount of equipment that stays on standby mode all day. This can amount to a significant percentage of an installation’s power consumption. In the O2 project, all electrical equipment was controlled by remote triggered breakers. Once again, the use of astronomical time triggering not only allowed the feature lighting to be triggered relative to sunset, but allowed all ancillary equipment to be fully powered down when not in use.
At Artistic Licence we want to expand on these small moves towards more energy-efficient means of lighting and take a more holistic approach to the subject. This has led us to start the ‘Zero Carbon Project’, a research project to develop methods by which lighting installations can actually become net power generators, not consumers. The project aims to develop lighting which will form an intelligent, power-generating ‘skin’ for a building. Power can be micro-generated by the skin, and any excess can then be fed into the city power distribution grid. This in turn will store the power, allowing it to be used when it cannot be micro-generated. The user will effectively be able to ‘dial in’ the carbon footprint they wish to achieve. So why write about this? Why not develop away, patent it all and build the products? The Zero Carbon Project is bigger than that. It needs the involvement of many companies, our trade organisations and our government and a great deal of open collaboration between all of these. We want to make this an industry-wide project and are gathering interested parties with the aim of sharing ideas.