Illuminating a Path to Greater Energy Savings

Adages like “a stitch in time saves nine” and “never put off ‘til tomorrow what you can do today” are linguistic remnants of an earlier age. Yet, they still ring true in many situations. Capturing immediate opportunities to futureproof energy savings for offices, warehouses and other commercial facilities is a great example.

Advances in lighting and controls technology and new data on energy savings strategies are currently converging to provide a once-in-a-decade (at least) opening to lock in energy savings for years to come. 

Averaging 50%, heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) is the single largest energy end-use in commercial buildings, according to the latest data published by the US Energy Information Administration, while lighting accounts for about 10%.  As first-generation LED fixtures are reaching the end of life and need replacement, now is the time to ensure that lighting retrofits not only include advanced controls—which alone can boost energy efficiency by about 50%, but are also integrated with HVAC systems to maximize both energy savings and building functionality.

While some HVAC systems include occupancy sensors, lighting controls provide much more granular data to finetune occupancy information. By integrating HVAC systems with occupancy sensors contained in lighting controls throughout the ceilings of a facility, lighting project managers can access an effective route for reducing the amount of HVAC energy wasted in a building’s unoccupied spaces. And the possible savings are substantial. A 2023 Design Lights Consortium (DLC) study showed that tying in networked lighting controls (NLC) with HVAC systems can reduce a building’s HVAC energy usage by 30% and potentially cut whole building energy consumption by up to 20%. 

Despite this potential, lighting controls themselves and integration with HVAC, in particular, have been slow to catch on. Following the 2023 study, the DLC convened working groups of lighting industry stakeholders to find out why. We heard that the primary market barriers to integration of NLC with HVAC systems differed depending on building size. For large buildings, the working group identified a lack of communication between people who work in lighting and those in HVAC. In smaller buildings, cost effectiveness played a bigger role.

The working groups’ findings catalyzed the DLC’s creation of an NLC-HVAC Integration Toolkit designed to help identify projects that are appropriate for integration and facilitate better communication and collaboration among various building trades and professionals. With an overarching goal of saving more energy, the toolkit includes five components:

• A concise handbook describing what each group involved in a project needs to know about each other, as well as a glossary, recommended best practices for integration, and references to relevant standards for lighting, HVAC and construction specification;
• A decision tree to determine which projects are good candidates for integration and avoid those where success is unlikely;
• 18 case studies presenting successful integration examples;
• A sample construction integration specification template; and
• A responsibility matrix template that presents an integration project in terms of major tasks and indicates which party is responsible for each.

The toolkit is available to download free of charge. And, by creating a free MyDLC account, toolkit users can access the DLC’s NLC qualified products list (QPL) to search, compare and select NLC products compatible with HVAC integration. Products on the DLC’s QPLs are eligible for incentives and rebates from nearly 75% of US and Canadian utilities and energy efficiency programs, which increases the affordability and decreases the ROI of lighting and HVAC integration projects.

To ensure that integration is possible, facility managers and decision makers need to first make sure that upgrades to LEDs and LED-to-LED replacements are equipped with controls. This is critically important for future energy savings, since the long life of LED products means it will be at least ten years before another opportunity to install controlled lighting comes along. If installing controls isn’t possible immediately, new lighting should at least be installed as “controls ready”—i.e., easily retrofitted to be controllable at a future date.

Moving the lighting market toward greater controllability is a proven energy-saving strategy, as well as one that can boost the functionality of commercial buildings and the satisfaction of their occupants. To promote this, the DLC has updated its Solid-State Lighting (SSL) Technical Requirements—specifications that manufacturers must meet in order to list their products on the DLC’s SSL QPL. Released on Nov. 3, 2025, SSL v6.0 is the first major revision of the DLC’s technical requirements for SSL QPL listing since 2020. Among other provisions, it is designed to streamline the pairing of lighting controls with LED fixtures.

In the more than five years since the DLC’s last significant SSL policy revision, LED lighting has grown to dominate the commercial lighting market and encompass an expanded menu of controls and advanced technologies. Scheduled to take effect in January 2026, the policy increases the energy efficiency threshold for DLC-listed products by an average of 14% across all product types, with some product efficacy increases as high as 19%.  Beyond efficiency, SSL v6.0 seeks to fully realize not just the energy-saving potential of today’s LEDs, but their value as enablers of connected smart, efficient building systems, as well.   

The policy optimizes opportunities to take commercial LED savings to the next level by further encouraging the integration with NLCs and luminaire level lighting controls (LLLCs) as enablers of connected, smart, efficient building systems. In addition, it revises the DLC Premium product classification, expanding beyond efficacy and quality to further enable incentives for advanced controls and integrated building systems. It also includes expanded requirements for dimming and controllability for all QPL-listed products and aims to increase adoption of controlled, connected lighting by correlating some aspects of the SSL and NLC QPLs. SSL v6.0 will also give lighting decision makers clearer information about the lifetime and environmental impact of lighting products. 

Taken together, these policy changes and the practical support and guidance provided through our NLC-HVAC Integration Toolkit will help facility decision makers not only select and install LED products and controls that enable optimal energy savings but also improve the quality of light and functionality of the built environment. For more information, please see the new technical requirements and information on integrating networked lighting controls, feel free to ask questions and provide feedback at [email protected].