Products and Design
Walmart to Cut Store Lighting By 40% With GE LEDs

Walmart has announced plans to purchase energy-efficient LED ceiling lighting fixtures for its new supercenters in the United States, stores in Asia and Latin America, and Asda locations in the United Kingdom, that will use 40 percent less energy than traditional lighting sources.

The retailer says the new fixtures will help to further its goal to reduce the kilowatt hour (kWh) per square foot of energy required to power Walmart buildings globally 20 percent by 2020. This is Walmart’s largest purchase of GE LED lighting to date.

Main sales floor lighting represents approximately 90 percent of the total lighting usage in each building, Walmart says. The LEDs will reduce energy use per store by more than 5 percent in the US alone, as they have a longer lifespan than traditional lighting fixtures and also offer significant savings in maintenance costs.

The decision to install GE LED lighting followed a pilot program at Walmart’s first all-LED supercenter in South Euclid, Ohio, launched in October 2013. Walmart says the pilot allowed it to gauge the quality and efficiency of the GE lights, and to determine the return on investment.

The move to LED ceiling lighting in the US is expected to produce an energy savings of 340,000 kilowatt hours per store — resulting in more than $34,000 in savings per year in each store (figured at 10.13 cents per kWh1). With 200 new Walmart stores adopting the new LED ceiling lighting over the next two years, this amounts to a total energy savings of 620 million kWh over the next 10 years.

Walmart says the expected total energy savings over the next ten years is equal to eliminating 327,360 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions — or the annual greenhouse gas emissions from more than 68,000 passenger vehicles or the energy use of nearly 30,000 American homes for one year.

“We have worked to find and scale energy-efficient LED lighting solutions that are cost effective and high quality, and now working with GE, we’re paving the way to make this a mainstream solution for the retail industry,” said Doug McMillon, president and CEO of Walmart. “LEDs have become an integral part of our energy-efficiency model for our stores and play a key role in achieving our overall sustainability goals. Just as important, the energy cost savings coming from these innovations will help us maintain the low prices our customers depend on us to provide.”

Walmart and GE have a long history of collaborating to develop lighting to meet Walmart’s needs. Walmart pioneered the use of LED systems in the retail setting and was an early adopter of LED signage in 2003. In 2005, Walmart worked with GE to install what is believed to be the first major rollout of an LED freezer case, and the store's parking lots in the US and abroad also were among the first in the industry to switch to LED lighting fixtures.

Last year, Walmart released a set of commitments aimed at increasing energy efficiency and achieving its goal of being supplied 100 percent by renewable energy by 2020. The retail company said it would begin producing or procuring some 7 billion kWh of renewable energy each year, a 600 percent increase over 2010 levels. Walmart also plans to reduce the energy intensity of its buildings by 20 percent worldwide.

Another company creating breakthroughs in LED lighting is Philips — in January, the company introduced the InstantFit LED T8, which reduces the cost for facility managers replacing fluorescent tube lighting with energy-efficient LED tube lamps (TLEDs). If all current fluorescent lighting was replaced by TLED lamps, Philips says it could result in savings of over $55 billion in energy costs — the equivalent of energy generated by 210 medium-sized power plants. In March, Philips joined forces with Ericsson to launch a new connected LED street lighting model. Ericsson says the partnership will solve two major issues that cities are facing today: improving network performance in dense urban areas while providing high-quality, energy-efficient public lighting; and earlier this month, Philips unveiled its new 40-Watt LED lightbulb, designed to resemble a traditional incandescent bulb, while saving significant energy and lasting up to 25,000 hours. By producing a bulb that looks the same, produces the same kind of light, but uses an LED rather than a traditional filament, Philips hopes to win consumer holdouts over to the energy-superior alternative.