In the Spotlight … At Fort Benning, LED Lighting Drives Savings and Safety

November 19, 2016

Throughout each day as many as 120,000 active duty soldiers, family members, retirees and civilians move about the vast, 182,000-acre Fort Benning military training base near Columbus, Georgia. This includes as many as 500 Army soldiers that run along the base’s streets before dawn as the day’s maneuvers begin.

This level of 24/7 activity demands that every aspect of Fort Benning’s infrastructure be in tip-top shape. Nighttime activity means the more than 3,500 luminaires and controls that make up its outdoor lighting system also have to be up to the task.

Walter Fricks, Flint Energies manager of Fort Benning operations gets this. He knows that LED lighting has the potential to reduce energy consumption by 60 percent compared to the base’s high pressure sodium (HID) system. He also believes that improved illumination levels and visibility are equally important advantages.

“Light provided by the LED system is more uniform with fewer dark spots and bright areas. The color of the light more closely resembles daylight and makes vehicle colors easier to distinguish,” he explains.

Flint Energies, which manages the base’s outdoor power system, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers partnered to improve Fort Benning’s outdated, energy inefficient and increasingly expensive-to-maintain outdoor lighting – choosing to replace it with an integrated LED system. Their goal was to help minimize the Army’s energy footprint, while enhancing the safety and security of individuals traversing Fort Benning roadways and intersections, checkpoints, medical facilities, parking lots, tank and motor pools, and other areas.

The project group selected our Holophane®, American Electric Lighting® and the ROAM® Enterprise portfolio from Acuity Controls – an entire line of luminaires and control systems with precisely engineered optics, to meet the challenges specific to modern “smart” military bases. For instance, the ROAM state-of-the-art wireless lighting control and monitoring system enables the scheduling of on/off and dim control functions to reduce energy and maintenance costs by dimming lighting levels by 75 percent for buildings unoccupied at night.

“LED is the only solution for street and parking area lighting at Fort Benning,” said Col. Andrew Holmes, the base’s garrison commander, who cited lower energy consumption, decreased greenhouse gases and reduced lighting pollution during normal operations as key advantages of the LED deployment.

Quality illumination without waste … all in a day’s work for the U.S. Army!

 

Click here to read the complete Fort Benning case study.

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