District 158 installs energy-efficient lights funded by $400,000 in grants

Huntley Community School District 158 recently completed installing energy-efficient lighting - retrofitting 9,400 fixtures - at several school buildings by the start of this school year.

The district received more than $400,000 in grant funding late summer toward the project - $283,466 from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity and $117,891 from the Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation. The district has received more than $1.5 million in energy-efficiency grants from both agencies over the past five years.

The new lighting will save the district more than $123,000 annually in energy costs and reduce its carbon footprint, said Doug Renkosik, director of operations and maintenance.

According to the EPA's Greenhouse Gas Equivalency Calculator, the 1,182,086 kilowatt-hours of electricity saved annually through the retrofit is equal to the greenhouse emissions from 1,991,002 miles driven by the average passenger car, or 886,480 pounds of coal burned in power plants.

Savings from this and previous projects completed since 2012 amount to more than $667,000 in annual energy cost reductions districtwide, officials said.

In 2015, Huntley High School also ranked the seventh most energy-efficient building of 33 Illinois high schools measured in a report by clean energy management company Ameresco. The report also found the school to be 19.5 percent more efficient in energy consumption than the average high school, serves students with 8.5 percent less space per student, has 24 percent less energy service costs, and spends 26 percent less than the average high school for natural gas.

Last school year, District 158's administration and transportation center became its first building to receive an ENERGY STAR rating from the EPA.