Denver Federal Center

1. Client Challenge:

The Denver Federal Center is committed to becoming one of the most sustainable campuses in the United States by the year 2020. This Center houses 28 different agencies in 44 federal buildings, totaling four million square feet of rentable space, covering 623-acres of campus. There was a tremendous amount of savings to be created by upgrading an outdated lighting system. Over 1,000,000 square feet was slated for an Investment Grade Audit. Many of these facilities contained first generation T8 fluorescent lighting systems.

RTS performed an audit of seventeen buildings including the exterior, attached fixtures, walkways, and parking lots. RTS evaluated numbers of variables such as how the spaces will be used, the amount of day-light, load potential, dimming, lamp color, initial cost, and cost to maintain moving forward.

2. Lighting Solution:

Retro-Tech performed a lighting upgrade in all 17 Buildings including all exterior lighting. This lighting project was performed in order to retrofit all 2×4 troffer fixtures and install new lighting controls with new LED luminaires installed in many of the exterior applications. The upgrade included new high bay fluorescent fixtures in various locations achieving more than 50% in energy reduction. In total, more than 18,000 fixtures were either retrofitted or replaced with new energy-saving technology.

3. The Results:

The results were fantastic. This project significantly helped move the GSA further toward its sustainability goals for 2020. In summary, this project reduced the total sum of all the facilities kWh consumption by more than 1,600,000 kWh annually.