Gigaom’s Barb Darrow has some good data regarding an installation of a connected LED lighting system from Digital Lumens at Massachusetts based Atlas Box and Crating. The company has a very large 292,000 square foot warehouse that it lights.

The installation had a payback period as little as 2 years, which is impressive:

In terms of energy saved, Atlas had been using 1.3 million kilowatt-hours  per year just for lighting before the installation and expected to cut 1 million kilowatt hours. When we spoke recently, Tavares said his projections show savings will be more . “We were striving to get to 300 kilowatt hours per year but it looks like it will be 250 kilowatt hours.”

Atlas is saving over a million kilowatt-hours per year. Not sure what they pay for power, but even at a low rate of 5 cents per kilowatt hour, that’s 50K. Not bad.

Perhaps more important is that the company got some operational efficiency from the project. The LED lights sense occupancy in the aisles of the warehouse and only switch on when someone is in a given aisle. Operators could visualize this data and if they saw that certain inventory was rarely accessed they could start to move inventory to other places that were more frequently accessed, creating efficiencies.

Point for the Internet of Things!