If a quintet of middle-school pupils gets their way, the D.C. Metro rail service will save $2.5 million on annual energy costs. West Branch business owners can get in on this savings, too, by looking up ... at their fluorescent light fixtures.


If the first reaction to this is “I can’t afford to upgrade our lighting in the whole building,” the Lights Out! team has an answer for that, too: Monthly savings on energy costs big enough to pay off a loan for the work.

Julia Diemer, Tyler Haub, Lilly Brown, Yash Patel and Justin Roth even ran some numbers on the Enlow Building, which houses the West Branch Times and Chris Kofoed’s accounting office.

Our two-story building has 50 light fixtures, each with four fluorescent bulbs. The common bulbs are technically called “T12” -- which, years ago, was hyped to save money on incandescent lighting. Now there’s “T8” and even “T5,” which use less electricty, last longer and produce equal or greater light.

They asked us how long we keep the lights on each day and figured out how much energy goes toward lighting each year: About $1,900. Switching to T8s would reduce that to about $1,250, a savings of about $650.

“T8s are a lot more efficient,” Roth said.

The numbers gathered by Lights Out! on everything from the Enlow Building, the West Branch Animal Clinic (a case study in the team’s brochure) and the D.C. Metro (official name: Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority) are not scribbled on notebook paper. The team got help from Chris Crull of Crescent Electric Supply Co., who punched the figures into General Electric’s Eco-Energy Estimator.

GE’s Estimator also spits out the estimated cost to upgrade (about $92 per fixture for the Enlow Building), how long it would take to pay off the loan (seven years), the annual carbon dioxide emission reduction (12,600 pounds), annual sulfur dioxide emission reduction (50 pounds), annual nitrogen oxide reduction (24 pounds), coal burning avoided (5,927 pounds), and atmospheric mercury contamination avoided.

If all the environmental data sounds a little technical, GE’s Estimator even puts things in layman’s terms: For the Enlow Building upgrade, the energy savings would be the equivalent of adding two more acres of forest, or taking one car off the road.

That comparison made their Science Club project more real to them.

“It’s amazing what one business can do just by retrofitting,” Diemer said.

GE’s Estimator is one way to make it real to bankers, too, Haub said.

“We can put it in the (Estimator) to find out how much they will save,” he said.

Community State Bank’s Ed Larew confirmed that, saying businesses can put that printout forward to help secure a self-liquidating loan.

The loan is treated as a business loan, he said, so businesses still need to put up collateral depending on the size of the project.

“It’s kind of a fun thing, and a big project,” Larew said. “It gets kids thinking about saving energy and has an impact on the planet, pollution and greenhouse gases.”

Brown said local businesses they surveyed were hesitant about the upfront cost.

“Most of the time they were uneducated, looking at the cost (of the work) but didn’t look at savings on their utility bills,” she said.

Patel said the project is not only pro-environment.

“We’re trying to be for the business,” he said.

As far as the DC Metro, Roth was visiting Washington D.C. this past fall with science instructor Dr. Hector Ibarra and the two used the subway system. Already working on the Lights Out! project, he said he could not help but notice the miles and miles of tunnels and platforms lit up with T12s. The two asked to talk to someone on staff, and found out that the DC Metro would like to make the switch to T5s and T8s as part of its TIGGER project.

“Metro agreed to meet with Dr. Ibarra and his students because we share a common interest in the energy conservation effort,” said Bessy Guevara of WMATA’s media relations department.

She said the agency figures it could save 60 percent on lighting by making the switch, and WMATA applied for stimulus funding to do the work, but was turned down. Roth said the reason was because the payback took too long. Guevara said the energy savings for the DC Metro project is enough to power 1,800 American homes per year.

“Over the past several years WMATA has desired to embark on a modernization lighting program but lacked sufficient funding,” she said.

WMATA tried LED lighting at its Foggy Bottom platform, but that experiment failed even though the LED lights are more efficient.

“These fixtures have experienced an unacceptable amount of premature failures and are currently being re-evaluated,” she said.

Lights Out! suggests WMATA apply again, but propose to do the work in phases, where the early energy savings pays for future lighting upgrades.