While the Lutron products being used in the Empire State Building are not new, it was abundantly clear that Malkin is taking a great deal of pride in deploying the solutions that are making a huge difference. So much so, that he hosted this press conference to announce the success of the relationship and continued to say, “What I am really here to talk about today is one of our first launches of products developed here at the Empire State Building, very similar to everything else we’ve done, we don’t own anything of it. We use it, our tenants benefit from it, I get no economic benefit from it whatsoever, it’s commercially available, it works, and it’s a terrific tool and a terrific asset. It’s this whole concept of the wireless lighting controls, which are integrated and make terrific results,” says Malkin.

“I am thrilled to be able to host Lutron here today and to welcome Mike Pessina [Lutron’s President] up here to talk about [this success] and more importantly about products that they have developed, which they will be able to launch out for others to use around the world and the United States.” In closing, Malkin emphasized, “It’s a huge opportunity. This is very inexpensive, high-return stuff.”

Pessina took the podium to discuss the solutions that his team worked on in collaboration with the Empire State Building and the Jones Lang LaSalle teams that yielded an astounding 65 percent of lighting energy savings and yielded a 2.75 year payback in the pre-build tenant spaces.

The solutions included Lutron’s retrofitable, Clear Connect Wireless lighting control technologies: wireless occupancy/vacancy sensors, wireless daylight harvesting sensors and personal local manual dimming controls.

Pessina was quick to point out that the individual worker is important. “Each and every light fixture’s light level can be individually adjusted for each person’s needs. This is very important, since there are people in this space and while energy savings is an important part of things, we still have to improve productivity and comfort while saving energy. We achieve this through personal control,” said Pessina.

Lutron is certainly not new to energy savings through lighting control and the company claims that Lutron systems and products save over 10 billion kilowatt hours of electricity annually, worldwide, which is equivalent to about $1 billion of utility costs.

When Pessina was asked if any building could expect a similar 65 percent energy savings through lighting control if deploying the same technology, the answer was an emphatic, “yes.”

Check out the slide show above for more details, stats, specs and pictures of the “pre-built” tenant spaces at the Empire State Building.

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About the author

Cindy Davis

Cindy Davis has had a passion for A/V and technology since taking apart her first transistor radio. She found it fun to write macros in DOS while at Lotus, but really loves her countless Apple products. Between 2000 and 2008 Davis was the editor-in-chief of Electronic House magazine. In 2011 she helped bring life to TechDecisions Media as editor-in-chief.