Dear Reader:

From NOAA’s Climate.gov, “Carbon dioxide is Earth’s most important greenhouse gas: a gas that absorbs and radiates heat. Unlike oxygen or nitrogen (which make up most of our atmosphere), greenhouse gases absorb heat radiating from the Earth’s surface and re-release it in all directions—including back toward Earth’s surface. Without carbon dioxide, Earth’s natural greenhouse effect would be too weak to keep the average global surface temperature above freezing.

“By adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, people are supercharging the natural greenhouse effect, causing global temperature to rise. According to observations by the NOAA Global Monitoring Lab, in 2021 carbon dioxide alone was responsible for about two-thirds of the total heating influence of all human-produced greenhouse gases.”

We don’t think we can explain it better than that.

The good news is that deploying a new LED lighting system reduces this phenomenon, as the new system will result in significantly fewer electrons taken off the grid, and therefore lessen the demand on the utility company’s need to generate power. And a reduced need for fossil fuel power generation means less carbon dioxide will be released into the atmosphere.

A Facilities Manager wanting to learn more about this relationship – the linkage between power generation and carbon dioxide – may want to look in on the EPA’s Quantifying the Emissions and Health Benefits of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. They use their Portfolio Manager tool to quantify how kWh reductions relating to a new LED lighting system (and other efficiency and conservation projects, for that matter) equates to carbon dioxide reductions. Here’s how they describe it:

“EPA’s ENERGY STAR® Portfolio Manager® is a free, interactive ENERGY STAR energy management tool that enables users to track and assess energy and water consumption for a single building or across a portfolio of buildings. The tool can be used to identify buildings with the most potential for energy efficiency improvements. A new feature of Portfolio Manager allows users to see how their buildings’ CO2 emissions compare with other buildings across the country, and to measure their progress in reducing emissions. The tool also has the functionality to compare the GHG performance of a user’s facility against the performance of a building with energy efficiency equal to the nation median using data from DOE’s national Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey. EPA’s ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager.”