Executive Vice-President, Technology & Infrastructure, CBC/Radio-Canada
Public Value at CBC/Radio-Canada - LED Transition Project
CBC/Radio-Canada's project to replace tungsten with LED lighting in our television studios is complete. LED lights are now used exclusively in the main studios of our broadcasting centres in Toronto, Montréal, Québec City, and Yellowknife. These studios were chosen for the project because they air the most content, use the most energy and can deliver the greatest savings by converting to LED. The transition is producing energy and bulb savings in the order of $155,000 annually, and reducing the Corporation's carbon footprint by 140 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. Care has been t...
Transcript (14 segments)
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Dan Boudreau0:04
Doing Things Better was an invitation to all CBC employees to put forward ideas that would help us deal with the budget situation, save money, but also that would just help us do things better. The LED transition project was a project that was originally taken by one of my employees who is the senior lighting director, Brad Dixon.
I brought the concept of corporately going to LEDs to Hubert Laqua because on small projects all across CBC we had been using LEDs. Productions had to bear the cost of buying the LEDs for their productions, and they were buying it for a variety of reasons, for creative reasons, for the economical reasons. But as a corporation we didn't have a policy of going that way.
I took it to Hubert and I'll never forget what he said to me. I'm going to give you a million dollars of our money to spend on this project. I need you to make sure that we deliver on the benefits and the savings. We pulled the project team together and we looked at studios across the country.
There was support for this kind of a project outside the CBC. There were organizations like BULMA which actually provided grants, there were provincial grants available, and there were a variety of other funding sources if we could demonstrate that we were actually going to be cutting our energy use.
What this represents in terms of an improvement in our carbon footprint and the reduction in our overall impact on the environment is actually quite staggering. Assuming that the six studios were replaced with LED in entirety, what we figured out is that this would amount to about 450 tons of greenhouse gases.
What that means is, like, one ton is roughly equivalent to four New York City buses.
Ultimately we invested in the top five studios that had the highest use here in Toronto. What that means is the National local studio was on a certain percentage of the time, News Network studio, Studio 50, that was also a very high-use studio. We also chose another studio which wasn't necessarily the highest use but had the poorest type of energy that was used for it, so that's Yellowknife.
The technology wasn't quite where we thought it was, and we actually had to work very, very closely with the technology manufacturers to come up with the right kind of instruments at the right price.
The fixture that we have here is actually a fixture that we retrofitted to LED. Originally it was a 1K Tungsten Fresnel, and now we've turned it into an LED unit by taking out the Fresnel parts and replacing them with LEDs.
The other thing that's allowed lighting directors and lighting technicians is a lot of creativity. So this also makes good production and operation sense. What we're showing here is just some of the creative ability that LEDs provide. Essentially out of a single source you can get multiple looks.
We can change within that set, multiple colors, have a totally different look. So multiple shows can use the same set and essentially have a whole different look. And if need be, we can have a little bit of fun with it.
Also at the end of the day, this project is such a great demonstration of what can come from an employee suggestion carried forward. We've had a lot of other agencies come and take a look at what we're doing because there are obviously a number of other broadcasters who are either having moved into this realm or they're contemplating moving into this realm.
The reality that CBC/Radio-Canada has once again led the industry, and in many ways it's a role that we've had traditionally over history, but it was nice to come to it in a new and fresh way. I think it speaks volumes to the type of organization this is, you know, that's taking responsibility not only for its legacy but also for the health of its viewers and the environmental stewardship of this country.
A whole bunch of positive changes made across the country, changes in terms of lowering our cost, changes in terms of increasing our sustainability, changes in terms of lowering our environmental impact, but perhaps even more fundamentally, changes in how we make television.