In 2019, energy consumption by the residential sector and commercial sector was about 21 quadrillion Btus and is equal to 28% of total U.S. end-use energy consumption in 2019 (EIA,2020). This is a significant portion of energy use and the ability to decrease a building’s energy cost will not only benefit the occupants financially but also reduce the carbon emissions across the US.

Lighting energy constitutes a large portion of a building's total energy. While more recent buildings on the UGA campus have better designs such as allowing more sunlight to illuminate the building rather than depending on artificial lighting or using light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for lighting, older campus buildings are still using incandescents. The Lamar Dodd school of Art building had a natural sunlight effect as part of the building design; however, most of the older buildings on UGA’s campus do not have this feature. Many of the buildings on the campus are quite old and were not built during a period where LED technology was in widespread use.

With the LED Retrofit program, UGA facility management division (FMD) is progressively and actively replacing the existing lighting fixtures or bulbs with high efficiency LED replacements. We were tasked with assisting FMD with this retrofit project. We are also going to identify which buildings need the new lamps. We will provide the scope of work and number of fixtures that require retrofitment; however, the labor will be performed by the FMD. For our project, we were asked to select three buildings that need the retrofit. We chose Marine Science, Hardman Hall and the Ecology Building.