Sams Club
Just like their corporate parent Wal-Mart, Sam's Club utilizes the power of Sunoptics Prismatic Skylights for their daylighting initiatives. The retail space comes to life with the full spectrum color attributes provided by natural light. Sunoptics' ability to maximize light transmission while providing 100% diffusion creates a glare-free, flicker-free and UV damage-free space designed to shut off electric lighting systems through lighting controls for an average of 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. With today's rising cost of energy, a high-performance prismatic daylighting application can pay for itself in as fast as 2 years or less through electric light energy savings (not including savings from reduction in lamp and ballast maintenance). Though high-bay lighting can be observed in these pictures, with an integrated lighting control system, the electric lighting system is dimmed 90% in these photos giving the appearance of on while only using 10% of their full power output.
A third party technical report and executive summary published by the California Energy Commission in October of 2003 on Daylight and Retail Sales documents that, "Based on current energy prices... estimated average whole building energy savings for the daylighted stores at $0.24/sf for the current design with a potential for up to $0.66/sf with a state-of-the-art design." The report also states that, "The value of the energy savings from the daylighting is far overshadowed by the value of the predicted increase in sales due to daylighting. By the most conservative estimate, the profit from increased sales associated with daylight is worth at least 19 times more than the energy savings, and more likely, may be worth 45 - 100 times more than the energy savings."
Sam's Club and Wal-Mart have hundreds of millions of retail square footage daylighted around the world with Sunoptics Prismatic Skylights. When it comes to daylighting for retail, there's no greater efficiency than off, with the power of Sunoptics.