Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is expecting to make annual savings of around £750,000 following the completion of an LED retrofit programme currently underway at its manufacturing facility in Solihull.
The project began in 2014 to install energy-saving LED lighting across the 300-acre site, which employs over 6,000 people across the production line. The programme was intended as a trial to test the potential of carrying similar retrofits across JLR’s portfolio.
Adrian Doyle, senior maintenance leader for JLR, said: “We wanted to make sure we had a step change and make a significant impact on the energy use on site. Also long term we wanted to decrease the cost of the maintenance as well standardise the products we were using.”
The works programme is expected to finish within the next three months and is expected to result in significant savings for the manufacturer. Several areas of the site have already been completed, including 16,000 lamp replacements being installed in the paint shop area.
The press shop, where body panels are pressed to form the structure of Range Rover, Range Rover Sport and Discovery models, has also been retrofitted with a ten-year payback period. The cavernous area, with a roof span of over 20 metres, was shut down for ten days to allow the work to be completed and will result in £98,000 in annual energy savings.
In addition, the final assembly site will yield a substantial saving of £529,000 from the company’s energy bills, saving 529 tonnes of CO2 per year in the process.
Craig Astfalck, managing director of energy management firm Ecopare which worked on the project, said: “When people look at step change they tend to look at it from a financial aspect which is very good but some of the outcomes we found from the project didn’t just include financial.”
In total, around 26,000 new LED lamps are expected to be installed at the Solihull site by the end of the project. On average, the fittings will reduce the site’s energy consumption from lighting by 75% as well as minimising the stockholding on site by moving from up to 18 different types of fittings to just four.
This standardisation throughout the site also means that light levels remain consistent throughout the facility, which is particularly important in the colour sensitive environment of the paint shop and surrounding areas. As well as ensuring a comfortable working environment for the thousands of JLR employees working on site, Astfalck pointed out that the project also improved product quality.
“The quality of product coming off the lines actually increased. We saw an 18% decrease in defects coming off one of the lines and this was just purely because we changed the lighting,” he said.
Other benefits include reduced stress of the electrical system, causing fewer outages, while maintenance costs are also expected to fall dramatically, particularly as faults with LED lighting can be identified within the first hundred hours of their lifecycle.