Internal research carried out by Greenlite Lighting Solutions Ltd, the UK’s leading low energy lighting maintenance company based at Blackpool in Lancashire, has found significant energy consumption differences from stores with similar profiles operated by the same retailer.

Greenlite were recently commissioned by a major High Street Retailer to benchmark the energy consumption of their stores. The results were startling; differences of £109 per day were highlighted between 2 stores of the same square footage. Over a year this equates to over £39,000. The retailer in question has over 300 sites across the UK and based on a small sample size test and assuming that half of the stores are using this additional energy, the company could be spending over £5.8m more on energy on the portfolio of stores than they would if the technology and systems of the best performing store were replicated across the product portfolio. Greenlite were able to monitor live data direct from the energy supplier and were able to highlight where savings could be made. In some instances, significant savings could be made simply by installing a ‘Last Man Out Switch’ to ensure lights were turned off at night.

A Greenlite spokesman commented “when you mention to a retailer you can save them £109 they are not really interested, even when you mention this is per day the alarm bells don’t seem to ring, but when it is pointed out that this is £39,000 a year, and if they say have 50 stores in total and the savings could be nearly £2m then it really hits home. We are amazed that in an economic time when retailers are looking at every penny that this is so often overlooked.”