Phoenix Convention Center Successfully Completes Renovations While Under Pressure

12/4/2024

Lighting upgrades in institutional and commercial facilities are complex enough. But when an impending event with the enormity of a Super Bowl is staring down the facility directors, managers, technicians and contractors responsible for planning and completing the project, the challenge becomes monumentally more complex. 

That was the scenario facing Bob Fingerman, assistant director of the Phoenix Convention Center. Fingerman and his in-house team, along with the project’s contractor, had to complete an $8 million lighting upgrade in two of the center’s halls on a two-year schedule that ended just in time for Super Bowl LVII in February 2023. 

“Promises were made years and years ago that building operations was going to meet every single aspect of what customers needed,” he says. “That is really where the pressure comes on. I'm glad to say that we did it without a hitch.” 

Spotlight on lighting 

The Phoenix Convention Center converted its existing metal halide and compact fluorescent lighting to LED technology in its exhibit halls, ballrooms, meeting rooms and public spaces. The decision to upgrade the center’s lighting systems grew out of the city’s sustainability efforts. 

“The city of Phoenix, through the mayor and city council, has a very robust sustainability plan over many years,” Fingerman says. “We took that vision and said to ourselves, ‘Where can we apply that in a strong, worthwhile approach?’“ 

The answer came quickly in the form of lighting systems in the convention center’s North and West halls. 

“The reason why is because lighting is so critical to our industry,” he says. “We're not a mall or a big box retail store. We are a convention center where we have production elements happening all the time.” 

The upgrades took a year to plan and two years to complete. They halved the number of lighting fixtures needed in the building and provided over 3.5 million kWh in energy savings and 24,000 kW in demand reduction. The projects also produced savings from reduced cooling load and over $500,000 per year in cost savings, which includes operational cost savings. 

The West building was built in 2006, and the North building in 2009, meaning the lighting systems and components being upgraded were different. 

“We had many different kinds of fixtures, and all of them were converted to LED to make sure that we are pushing as far as we can with technology,” Fingerman says. “The second part of this is the lighting controls. We consolidated three lighting controls into one, and the efficiency with the lighting controls coupled with the replacement to all LED has saved us so much in terms of money, labor and maintenance.” 

The two buildings actually had four different lighting control systems, which created its own set of operational complexities. 

“It was a real challenge to get all of those systems to work together, and it wasn’t as automated as we would want,” he says. “In fact, there would be times where areas of the building would not cooperate in terms of our lighting schedule. We really felt the need to not only transition to LEDs but, more importantly, to get all of these controls centralized onto one. And we've done that.” 

Tackling challenges 

As with any project of this size and complexity, upgrading the Phoenix Convention Center’s lighting systems meant dealing with a series of challenges. 

Super situation. Perhaps the most ominous of these was the looming Super Bowl heading Phoenix’s way as the project progressed in 2021 and 2022. 

“The hard deadline was for this to be up and running prior to the Super Bowl activities happening here in Phoenix,” Fingerman says. “That was the critical goal, and we needed every ounce of time and opportunity to make that happen. 

“I would have liked more room in between the completion of the project to the start of the Super Bowl, which was about two or three months. As a perfectionist, it made me a little nervous just because I know how many variables are involved, and I know what can happen if things aren't done correctly. But we hit it out of the park 100 percent, and all of my concerns were put to rest.” 

Ongoing activities. Super Bowl aside, the convention center’s project team also had to contend with the ongoing events the facility was hosting during the renovation. 

“Doing a major overhaul of our lighting system is very challenging when we cannot pump the brakes on event activity,” he says. “Conversely, we want to step on the gas when it comes to booking events that benefit the city of Phoenix. 

“We have these two competing aspects where we have this massive amount of work design and engineering. Then we have our event schedule. How do we make these two conflicting situations happen simultaneously? That was the real challenge because there was a lot of after-hours work, not only for our own internal staff here at the convention center but our contractor.” 

Surprise, surprise. As with most upgrade projects in existing buildings, Fingerman and his team ran into unexpected issues when performing the actual work began. 

“Our buildings are roughly about 20 years old, so when you start to drill down into how we're going to affix the new lighting fixtures to the building, to the infrastructure, we start to notice some things that we had to correct with adhering fixtures to our ceilings and making sure that the mounting devices do not loosen all of that,” Fingerman says, adding that workers had to erect massive scaffolding structures to access areas lifts and aerial booms could not reach. 

“All of that had to be figured out, and often times, that had to be figured out in real time, which can really throw a wrench into the plans,” he says. “Those are variables that are oftentimes unknown. We try to get our hands around every single issue and circumstance that we may be faced with, but with real-time operations, anything can happen at any time.” 

Payment and performance 

The Phoenix Convention Center’s lighting upgrade projects presented a potentially complex set of decisions related to funding the projects. 

“When this was brought to us, we didn't really know how we wanted to fund it," Fingerman says. “There were a lot of different opportunities on how we would pay for this. We could have leveraged future savings from our energy bills to pay the cost of this over time, but we didn't want to get into a situation where we were leveraging future savings. We wanted to know exactly where we stood with the financing of it. 

“We did the traditional route of paying for this in full once the work was completed, compared to leveraging it like you would a mortgage over time over years and utilizing the savings that we have generated from this project to pay for it. While that's very creative and there's a lot of great opportunities for that, we wanted to take a more conservative route.” 

Fingerman says convention center officials could have worked with the energy service company to guarantee a rate of savings that the general contractor would guarantee. If the contractor failed to meet the guarantee, they would come back on site and make adjustments to deliver on their promise. 

“While that sounds great, we as a department chose not to do that,” he says. “We wanted to make sure that we paid for our project in full once it was completed. However, the contractor is still responsible for meeting those guaranteed savings over a 20-year period, so every year we have an audit that is given to us to make sure that those savings have been realized.” 

So far, the project has delivered positive financial results. 

“In the first year, the savings were $530,000,” Fingerman says. “The project cost was approximately $8 million, of which we are guaranteed savings of $12 million over the next 20 years. We thought this was an absolute win-win because like many of our other projects, once they're installed, we have a one-year warranty. This gives us a much better guarantee that our savings are going to be there.” 

He says the upgrades also have more than delivered on the desired operational benefits. 

“I say that because under our old antiquated system, we found many gremlins that were part of the system,” he says. “We don't know why our lighting system isn't working the way we want it to or isn't working the way it was designed. We had to come up with big workarounds on how our systems will meet the needs of our clients. 

“Since our project has come online and it has been completed, all of those problems have virtually gone away. We program it, and it just happens.” 

Dan Hounsell is senior editor for the facilities market. He has more than 30 years of experience writing about facilities maintenance, engineering and management.