Orion Energy Services: Wetzel Brothers’ Lighting Change Earns Orion’s Environmental Award

For further Information contact:

Dave Cary, Communication Specialist, Orion Energy Services, 1204 Pilgrim Rd., Plymouth WI 53073, (920) 892-2935, dcary@oriones.com

Tim Zandron, Pressroom Manager, Wetzel Brothers Inc., Milwaukee WI tim.zandron@wetzelbrothers.com

Anything that decreases electric power usage will benefit the environment because power that isn’t generated doesn’t pollute.

Wetzel Brothers, a state-of-the-art point of purchase printing firm replaced 88 metal halide lights with 88 Orion Illuminator fixtures recently at the firm’s Milwaukee location. Lighting power usage, which had been running at 229,768 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, dropped to 110,704 kWh — a 51% saving of 119.064 kWh.

Power costs fell correspondingly. Pressroom manager Tim Zandron said that the change, coupled with the removal of two electric ovens from the same area, decreased the entire company’s total electric bill by 23 percent. “The ovens drew quite a bit of power,” he commented.

What does this reduction mean to the environment?

According to federal EPA formulas, the 119.064 kWh power saving will mean that in each succeeding year some 116 tons of carbon dioxide, 32 tons of carbon, 10.1 tons of sulfur dioxide and just under five tons of nitrogen oxides — all pollutant by-products of electric power generation — will not be released into the atmosphere.

This saving is also reckoned to be the air-cleaning equivalent of a 22-acre forest or removing 19 cars permanently from the road. It is also the conservation equivalent of saving 9,829 gallons of gasoline per year.

“We’re glad and gratified to receive the environmental award,” Zandron said. “We’re concerned with environmental issues and power usage and are making a strong effort to do whatever we can to conserve.”

Zandron said the project began when an Orion Energy Services representative called on him. “We took what he eventually proposed and thought it over,” Zandron said. “And then we proposed the project to our corporate headquarters — it took a while for them to buy into it, but they did and we changed the lights and removed two ovens from our pre-press area.”

“We had had metal halide lights, and at the time we decided to change, it was time to change the bulbs,” Zandron said. “The price difference between the new metal halide bulbs and the new Orion fixtures wasn’t all that far apart, so we decided to go ahead.”

“Everybody’s been happy with the lights,” Zandron said. “Naturally, we like the cost savings, but in my opinion the Orion lights give more and better light than we had before.”

Wetzel’s savings and the related environmental b