It might be a little uncanny to suggest using clean energy for businesses; after all, solar energy has a negative reputation for being exorbitantly expensive. It’s true that solar energy is an investment, but the fact is solar energy has rapidly dropped in price over the past several years due to highly-researched and improved methods in manufacturing. The cost per watt of energy produced by a solar panel has seen a 99% reduction since the 1970s, and current models predict even stronger reductions in the coming years. This makes solar perfect for a range of applications, such as outdoor lighting.
If you’re looking to promote green energy usage for your business, municipality, HOA, or other entity in need of lighting, look no further than solar lights for parking lots.
If using solar is a new idea for you, since traditional lighting via grid-tie power has been so prevalent, take a moment and educate yourself on how “going green” can actually save you some green, too.
How Do Solar Lights for Parking Lots Save Money?
Your initial thoughts might be that solar parking lot lights save a lot of money from energy usage—and you’re right, they do. A typical traditional grid-tie light (let’s take high-pressure sodium) can cost approximately 50 dollars a month. Now, expand that to a parking lot with 10 lights. Now we’re talking 500 dollars a month just on energy costs.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s take that usage to 10 months. Now, we’re talking 5,000 annually (rounding down). Expand that cost over the course of 10 years. Now, we’re talking 50,000 dollars for the average life cycle of a 10-light system for a parking lot. That’s just the rounded-down energy costs.
With solar, you pay zero. That has a nice ring to it.
How Else Do You Save with Solar Lights?
I’m glad you asked! Oftentimes, extra costs for lighting are overlooked. It’s obvious you can save on energy costs over the course of a decade.
But how would you like to potentially save several thousands of dollars on the day of installation?
Typically, the largest expense of solar lighting is trenching, which can double the initial price of purchasing traditional lights. Trenching is excessively expensive, time-consuming, and damaging to the installation area. There are typically high equipment fees, backfill labor costs, and other requirements that take the initial bill and make it even larger. It’s required labor for a lot of public utility, especially when it comes to outdoor lighting.
Unless you use solar.
Solar doesn’t require trenching or wiring fees. All the power needed to run the LED fixtures for these solar lights for parking lots is accessible from the sun. Not spending money on trenching typically saves about 20% of the initial cost of a solar lighting project, but that cost tends to fluctuate because of individual project requirements. Parking lot projects are typically very expensive if the lot is already paved over because you’ll need to fund the labor costs for trenching and then re-paving. Or, as before, you could use solar and skip all that.
If you’re not convinced, here’s a little more information. The total cost of ownership for solar lights for parking lots is significantly lower than traditional lighting.
These are obviously ballpark figures and don’t reflect what your project may require, but those numbers have been consistent averages for many projects over the past several years. Outdoor lighting is no small expense, so we’ve run the numbers to determine how we can save you more money over time.
If you’re still not convinced that solar lighting is a better option than traditional lighting, there’s more in store for you.
Earn Money Back Through Solar Tax Incentives
For 2020, the solar investment tax credit can earn you 26% back on your solar project. So, not only can you save several thousands of dollars with solar lights for parking lots, you can actually earn money back through tax credits. That’s just another reason why solar is worth it and why so many businesses and municipalities have chosen solar lighting over traditional—not to mention using the cleanest form of energy around.
Greenshine New Energy has had over 30 years of combined solar lighting experience under one roof. We’d love to show how you can save lots of green by “going green” with investing in solar lights for parking lots. It really is a “bright” idea.