LED Lighting: Starbucks saves millions on energy bills

When you're talking about retrofitting a large building like the Empire State Building or replacing bulbs in thousands of Starbucks stores, the energy savings can be huge.

That's just what Starbucks has found now that the replacing of incandescent and halogen lights in 7,000 stores in the U.S. and Canada has been completed. The company's Director of Environmental Impact said that the program is on target to cut lighting energy consumption by 80 percent.

The good folks at Greenbiz did the math and figured that each 1,000 square foot store was saving $600 a year and reducing CO2 emissions equivalent to 10 barrels of oil. The lights also cut total store energy consumption by 7 percent.

LEDs were installed in the sitting and beverage areas where the color of the light was most important and CFL bulbs were installed in the rest of the store. The energy and cost savings calculated were for the LED lights alone.