Advanced Lighting Controls Support BREEAM-Certified Luxury Shopping Center and Parking Garage

In the age of online shopping, brick and motor retail needs to be an exceptional destination in order to thrive.  Victoria Gate with its eye-catching architecture, high-end restaurants and boutique shops certainly fits the bill.  Opened in October 2016, as part of Victoria Leeds, one of the premier shopping districts in northern England, Victoria Gate includes a glass-covered shopping mall with a mix of fashion, home and beauty shops and restaurants, and a multi-story parking garage. Victoria Gate was named ‘Best Shopping Centre in the World’ at the 2017 MIPIM Awards, an international property event hosted in Cannes, France.

A key objective of Victoria Gate’s design and construction was to achieve a BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) Excellent rating. Projects meeting this world-leading sustainability assessment method must meet rigorous requirements that often are more stringent than local codes and regulations.  BREEAM consists of individual assessment issues spanning five core technical categories: governance; land use and ecology; resources and energy; social and economic wellbeing; and transport and movement; plus a sixth category called ‘Innovation’.  To support BREEAM requirements, clear guidelines were set for Victoria Gate’s lighting solution—the lighting system needed to be energy-efficient, durable, easy to maintain, cost-effective, fully automated and include emergency lighting.

Centralized Lighting Control Solution

The ENCELIUM® Light Management System (LMS) and fixture-integrated OPTOTRONIC® DALI LED Drivers and PrevaLED® LED Modules by OSRAM were selected for this project citing a combination of product flexibility, performance and reliability. The ENCELIUM System and lighting components made significant contributions to the Victoria Gate project in achieving BREEAM Excellent certification.

All luminaires in the Victoria Gate shopping center and parking garage are centrally controlled and monitored by the ENCELIUM System. Polaris 3D® Light Management Software provides an intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the ENCELIUM System installation including data-driven dashboards on energy consumption, building occupancy, lamp lifetime and more, that the facilities team can use to improve occupant comfort and reduce energy consumption. Polaris 3D Software greatly facilitates the work of building managers.

Lighting scenes for different zones can be created or adjusted to support different schedules and activities at Victoria Gate including time of day, opening hours, seasons, special events or sales promotions. Building zonal maps and floor plans for each area enable a facilities team member to view a level or floor within Polaris 3D software and determine lighting levels and energy consumption. In addition, detecting and managing faults in the system can be done remotely in Polaris 3D software instead of sending an engineer to investigate.

“Overall, I am very impressed with the functions and tools that enable us to view single sensors and light fittings in detail. Fault identification is also a great feature. Where a fault occurs, it directs you to the location on the system and allows you to run test signals – a nice feature allows you to “wink” and flash the faulty light so it can be easily viewed from the desktop. This really saves us time compared with a conventionally wired system where we would need to refer to plans in order to identify defective lights and where they are located.” - Andy McCulloch, Technical Services Manager at Victoria Leeds

Emergency Lighting and Parking Garage Safety

With the ENCELIUM System, emergency lighting automatically switches on when there is a power outage, illuminating the shopping center, parking lot, corridors, stairs, ramps, and passageways leading to an exit.

“With the wired ENCELIUM solution the emergency lighting testing can be done from the server and the computer, instead of walking around the whole site – that`s an immense labor reduction for us.  All can be done from the computer and any fault, no matter how minor, can be extracted as a document that can be used for audit purposes.” -  Daniel Tully, Business Support Manager at Victoria Leeds

In the Victoria Gate parking garage, optimum safety and energy efficiency are essential. The OSRAM solution enables lighting to follow cars and pedestrians according to their presence and movement, thus lighting their way and allowing safe and comfortable movement at all times. When there is no movement for a defined period of time, the lights turn OFF.

About BREEAM Certificated Construction

BREEAM is the world’s leading sustainability assessment method for master planning projects, infrastructure and buildings. First published by the Building Research Establishment (BRE) in 1990, it is the world's longest established method of assessing, rating, and certifying the sustainability of buildings. It is used in more than 70 countries.

To achieve BREEAM Excellent certification, Victoria Gate adopted some of the latest innovations available, allowing a reduction in overall energy demands.