dark skies abuse

I walked past this building the other night - 90 Whitfield Street - it's called Qube. It's developed by Derwent London. It seemed rather flagrantly lit; all the lights on in an absolutely empty building. But there was a bloke on the corner with a tripod taking a picture so, wanting to think the best, I thought maybe they've just turned them on for him.

And then I walked past at about 3 o'clock this afternoon and all the lights were on then. During the day. With no-one, seemingly, there. Which is ironic since the website boasts that a "...presence detection system controls the lighting, both on the individual office floors and within the common parts, to ensure that lights are turned off when an area is not in use, to minimise the lighting energy consumption."

It would appear that there's an over-ride while the landlord's trying to flog the building. To give them the benefit of the doubt I guess there could have been someone in there looking around and that could have triggered all the lights. So I went back just now. 5.30 and it looked like this:

Maybe the presence detection system is detecting otherworldly presences.

I also noticed here that "Derwent London announces letting of 18,837 sq ft on 2nd floor to Aegis Media Ltd" and that if it's the same Aegis Media that's part of Aegis Group then their environmental policy says: "Energy efficiency, for example, is a key driver of our relocation and facilities policies."

Perhaps someone from Aegis could call someone at Derwent and ask them to turn the lights off on the second floor.

My first thought about all this is that there should be some way of naming and shaming companies who do this. Developers have long environmental policy papers but I can't find much discussion of this kind of issue.  And it's not just empty buildings. But I always think naming and shaming is a bad thing (Let his who is wihout sin..etc) and  I presume developers do it because it rather effectively draws attention to their properties. Which means they've got a lot of money vested in leaving the lights on. So they're not going to change easily.

So I wonder if there isn't more of a carrot to offer them as opposed to a stick to beat them with. Could you develop a low-energy alternative to just leaving all the lights on? Something that delivers lots of attention without much energy. That ought to be possible. And maybe it could be re-deployable from one development to another as a particular building fills up with tenants.

I dunno. Maybe that would be a good thing to think about before or at geekgreen.

UPDATE: I just walked past. 9pm on a Saturday. The only lights on were in the lobby. So that's something. And thanks for the comments below, helpful stuff.

Comments

[Tim]

Howies had a similar problem with their Carnaby Street store, IIRC - the terms of their lease said it had to be fully lit up all night. They've put a "press to light up store" button on the front window, which struck me as a devious way round a frankly bonkers lease term.

But it's *everywhere*, this problem - the whole of the riverside from London Bridge to Tower Bridge is lit up like an oil refinary 24/7, as is the Gherkin, and Lloyds, and 1 Canada Square, and the list goes on. Then scale up by the number of office buildings in the UK, and the numbers go off the scale...

[David Hawksworth]

I work for Aegis media so will have a word.

[James Holloway]

You're right in saying that the lights being on is a sales pitch - filling premium office space in London isn't necessarily as easy as it sounds.

Assuming the presence detection is working and activated, however, presence (more accurately - movement) detection typically switches off lights 30 minutes after the last detection - any shorter and you risk guffing up your fluorescent lighting. Open plan areas are probably zoned all in one - so one PIR picking up a signal will turn on all the lighting on the floor, since people don't like to work in isolated pools of light when the rest of an open plan areas is dark - it's very unnerving. All of which is to say it'd probably take someone at least 15 minutes to walk around all the control zones to trigger the lighting. Since you saw that all the lighting was on, you'd have to be arriving in the 15 minute window between the man turning on all the lights, and none of them turning off. The odds of doing that several times in a day? Pretty slim.

Given that in open plan areas, lighting is liekly to be controlled so generally - presence detection is really no more effective than making sure the last man out turns out the lights. A much more effective means of reducing energy through smart control would be using photocells (light detectors). The spec indicates they only use photocells to control external lighting - simply turning them on when it gets dark, presumably. For a building with an atrium (which this has) this is a missed opportunity. The facade is all windows. I'd expect photocells to be in place across the interior to turn off and dim down the lighting nearest to windows - these don't need to be turned on during the day. This significantly reduces the buildings electricity demand. (Of course a fully glazed building presents significant energy challenges thermally - why do we build greenhouses everywhere?)

In terms of low energy ways to draw attention to a building, there are certainly options. One is to turn on only the lights adjacent to windows - this would look peculiar, but not if you use blinds on all windows (the tenants are going to have to install blinds anyway to control glare, given that this is office space). You basically design this feature lighting to illuminate the blinds. This internal approach to architectural lighting can be a very effective approach to revealing the form of a building. This way, you'd use a fraction of the energy, but you do lose out on displaying the interior spaces.

Another option would be to look at LED lighting to the facades. Buckingham Palace's LED architectural lighting is well designed, lights up the building nicely, and at a fraction of the former demand. Glass doesn't lend itself to floodlighting particularly, but there are plenty of horizontal surfaces on the facade to illuminate. I think it's hard to justify architectural lighting from an energy point of view, but a well designed system could make a feature of the building using much less energy than simply leaving all the lights on. Again, though, you're not showing of the interiors.

A third option, assuming the lighting throughout is fitted with dimmable control gear, would simply be to dim all the lighting down. Dimming the lamps to 10% output would still make the interiors visible, and the building would glow rather nicely, I imagine - and 10% of the light output translated to roughly 10% of the energy consumption.

It isn't right, though.

[Dan Hill]

Maybe some kind of system that (efficiently) projected giant numbers over the building, indicating their real-time energy use :)

[doug]

ooo - new offices for us?

either way, I'll have a moan

[Rebecca Caroe]

Charles, there is the technology to do that! One of my clients More Associates has done a light architecture display for Bishops Square Spitalfields that shows how much solar energy is coming off the roof at any given moment - displayed at ground level.
http://www.moreassociates.com/work/bishops_square

Rebecca Caroe

[Tom]

There is a building somewhere around The City which has a facade which fades into and out of different colours - I am pretty sure it's only the facade that is lit in this way and it made me stop and stare the other day - maybe that is a lower energy solution to attarcting attention ?