LED Lighting Retrofit Is Organic for Ecoresponsible Food Producer

Plant engineer of WhiteWave Foods’ Virginia plant, Toby Duveneck implemented a 650-fixture high-bay LED lighting retrofit throughout the plant that saves the company $15,000 per month in electricity, eliminates most of the maintenance required to change out fixtures, and reduces the cold-storage chiller energy consumption by a third.

WhiteWave Foods’ Mount Crawford, Va., manufacturing plant dwells in the lowlands beneath the Blue Ridge Mountains. In fact, the mountains are visible from the employee cafeteria.

It is a beautiful site for making and packaging the food processor’s Horizon Organic® milk, Silk® soy milk, International Delight® creamers and iced coffees, and LAND O’LAKES® creamers in pursuit of its corporate mission “to become the earth’s favorite food company.” (See Figure 1).

As plant engineer of WhiteWave foods’ Virginia plant, Toby Duveneck is expected to run the facility with a focus on capital improvement projects. He implemented a 650-fixture high-bay LED lighting retrofit throughout the plant that saves the company $15,000 per month in electricity, eliminates most of the maintenance required to change out fixtures, and reduces the cold-storage chiller energy consumption by a third. He expects the warehouse LEDs to last about 12 years.

On its Web site, the company proclaims that it is transforming not just the business of food, but business in general (See Figure 2). “How we do business is as important as being in business,” said Sara Loveday, corporate communications.

“WhiteWave creates healthy, responsibly produced foods that are welcome at everyone’s table. We’re always focused on minimizing our environmental footprint.”

Three key goals comprise the manufacturer’s sustainability program, which is part of its strategic growth plan and a company wide approach to environmental stewardship and corporate responsibility. To help ensure WhiteWave products are produced responsibly and with respect for the earth’s natural resources, Loveday said the goals are to:

• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2013.
• Reduce landfill waste by 30 percent by 2013.
• Reduce noningredient water use by 15 percent by 2013.

WhiteWave employs about 1,500 people nationwide in its plants, sales offices, corporate-owned farms, and headquarters.

Lighting Retrofit a Good Fit

One of the company’s sustainability projects that stemmed from its environmental goals—and operating cost goals—was a high-bay lighting retrofit, said Toby Duveneck, plant engineer.

The potential financial benefit of a lighting retrofit was as much a factor as the environmental benefits, Duveneck said. The company had been adversely affected by the economy in 2009. “That particular year, our volume was not going to be as strong as we had projected it to be. We’re a cost center, so we worry about our budget, what our cost per gallon is. So we were trying to find ways to cut costs,” he said.

Duveneck and his team have been working on several projects over the last three years to cut costs through green initiatives, he said. “In an older facility, especially, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit, because over the years, energy costs go up, water costs go up … but the plant was designed 20 years ago when the mindset was that air doesn’t cost anything, water doesn’t cost anything, and electricity is cheap,” Duveneck said. He had experienced substantial cost savings with a lighting retrofit at another plant previously. “So lighting was one of the first capital improvements I looked at here.”

Figure 3
The high-bay LED lights fit the same footprint that the plant’s metal halides occupied.

Originally he and his team planned to replace the metal halide lights with T8 fluorescent lighting, Duveneck said. “We discovered that LEDs were becoming economically feasible, and we decided to pursue that option as a higher-tech alternative because of the lower running costs and longer life of the LED units.”

In the third quarter of 2010, Duveneck and his staff began to replace old fixtures as they failed in the factory’s 32-foot-high ceilings with new Dialight high-bay LED fixtures.

About 15 minutes was required for each fixture installation. “The lights actually fit the same footprint as the metal halides, so that made it really easy to just swap one out at the same mounting point,” Duveneck said (see Figure 3).

The largest installation challenge turned out to be the electrical grounding, he said. “The Dialight LEDs were more sensitive to existing grounding problems that we had, so we needed to correct them before the installation could be completed.”

Cool Solution for Cold Storage

Figure 4
The metal halide lighting previously used in the cold storage area was contributing substantial heat, countering the chiller’s efforts. In addition, the lighting, slow to start up, was left on at all times.

The next phase of the project was to perform a whole-area lighting retrofit. The most conspicuous energy expenditure was in the manufacturer’s cold-storage warehouse where the food products must be kept at 37 degrees. The metal halide lighting in that area was contributing substantial heat, countering the chiller’s efforts. “When you’re working with cold storage, heat is a big issue [see
Figure 4]. Because of the lighting, the chillers were doing double duty, basically.”

Before launching the full warehouse retrofit of 360 LEDs, Duveneck had to cost-justify it to ensure that the LED lighting retrofit would meet expectations for return on investment. “One of the struggles with these types of projects, when you salt and pepper them in, is actually tracking savings,” he said.

To do so, Duveneck designated a trial area within the cold-storage warehouse and installed a metering device on the panel on which all of the lights were to be installed. He then took baseline measurements of the power usage over a trial period of a week. He repeated the analysis postinstallation and compared the results.

Duveneck said he looked at three costs: the electricity usage itself, the replacement maintenance, and the ammonia refrigeration.

Comparing the electricity usage was simple, he said. He just measured wattage. The utility company charges $0.07 per kilowatt.

“For maintenance, the cost of the LED is about $690, with an expected life of about 12 years in the cooler. The replacement cost of a ballast and a metal halide was around $145, and we had to replace that every two to three years.”

Duveneck calculated the refrigeration savings by measuring the average cost of removing a BTU of heat from the warehouse and also how much waste heat a metal halide light produced. Every watt that the metal halide consumed more than the LED consumed was considered waste heat. He divided that difference by how much it cost to remove that heat.

“We found that the rough rule of thumb was that about a third of the actual electricity savings is returned again in cooling,” Duveneck said.

“So … doing the math on that, we could realize several thousand dollars of savings just in electricity and maintenance alone.”

Bright Results, Bright Future

Altogether, the company has installed nearly 650 high-bay LED lighting fixtures in the warehouse and plant—almost all of the plant lighting. It is one of the largest LED installations of its kind, according to the lighting manufacturer’s spokesperson.

Initially there was some resistance from employees who worried about glare and because the LEDs are a lot brighter than the metal halides. “It took us some time to adapt to them, but now, when you walk through the plant and you see the old yellow ones, it’s clear that these are crisp white and more useful light than the metal halides,” Duveneck said.

Although the LEDs are substantially whiter and brighter than the metal halides, the company exchanged the metal halides with LEDs on a one-for-one basis. “We wanted to make sure we actually improved the lighting while still reducing our energy,” he said.

Duveneck said that not only is the new lighting of better quality, it saves the company $15,000 a month in electricity bills alone.

Because the LED lighting does not contribute heat to the space like the metal halide lighting did, Duveneck was able to double up on savings in the warehouse. “If you take the heat out of the lights, you don’t have to cool them, plus you’re saving all the energy you were wasting in the first place,” he said.

Contributing to the energy savings is that the fixtures can be occupancy sensored because the lighting is instantly switchable. The company could not do that with the metal halides, he said.

Neither metal halide nor fluorescents perform very well in cold environments, Duveneck said. “The restart is slow, so you just leave the lights on because you can’t afford to bring those on and off. With the fluorescents, you’d wear out your ballasts, and with the halides, the warmup period is too long.

“We were able to put individual motion sensors on all the LED lights. They actually follow the flow of traffic as we go through the facility.”

Rebate a Tasty Treat

Enhancing the cost savings, Dominion Power, the company’s utility provider, offers a number of rebates to its customers for various lighting types. WhiteWave received a rebate of $111 per fixture on 230 fixtures it replaced in the warehouse, as well as additional retrofits it made earlier, for a total of roughly $40,000 (see Figure 5).

Figure 5
Not only did the food manufacturer realize electricity savings, it qualified for a $111 per fixture utility rebate. Source: http://dom.com/dominion-virginia-power/customer-service/energy-conservation/pdf/va-lighting-rewards-rebate-chart.pdf.

“We had not factored this into our savings calculations for the lighting project because we were not sure how easy the rebate would be to get, but it turned out to be a relatively painless process,” Duveneck said.

Low Maintenance Has Long Reach

The electricity savings alone are not the main benefit, though, Duveneck said. Accessing the lighting above the production equipment is difficult, and replacing the bulbs requires using rental lift equipment, which compounds the cost.

Although the electricity cost savings are impressive, the greatest savings came as a result of the low maintenance, Duveneck said. The metal halide lighting had to be replaced every two to three years, and gaining access to some of the plant lights was very difficult. Reaching the lighting located over large production equipment required renting lift equipment and personnel time.

“The lift rental and labor cost is more expensive than the bulb.

“So despite [being motivated by] the electricity savings we get from the lights, the main motivation for this retrofit was the maintenance savings,” Duveneck said.

“Now we don’t have to touch the lights again for 10, 15 years.”

Photography by Andrew Shurtoff for Green Manufacturer, except where otherwise noted.

WhiteWave Foods, 6364 S. Valley Pike, Mount Crawford, VA 22841, 540-434-7328, www.whitewave.com