UIC Energy, which specializes in LED lighting, has Wallingford as a municipal target

Longtime chamber VP starts new chapter in sales is the title of the article that appears in the August 31, 2013 edition of the Record Journal

Beyond the beginning focus of the article which outlines Ms. Semrau finding a great opportunity for work that allows her to use all of her skills that she has mastered over her decades of experience at the Quinnipiac Chamber of Commerce, it covers many great things for Wallingford from the fact that UIC Energy moved its manufacturing headquarters from India to Wallingford earlier this year.

Vivek Kamath, president of UIC was quoted in the article indicating that the company decided to bring the entire assembly and manufacturing side of things to the United States.

Nitin Koppiker, vice president of manufacturing also indicated that “bringing the facility to Wallingford gives the company more control over its products company’s main goal is to provide energy efficient LED lighting to entire municipalities and that Wallingford is a target"

The Electric Division is taking a conservative approach to LED technology and has been for a many months through its testing of a number of LED technologies.

There are many benefits to utilizing this technology, from their longer life span which translates to less time spent maintaining and replacing parts as well as the energy savings that the lighting brings.

Systems like the ones that UIC Energy manufactures allows for the remote control of the lights which allows a large business infrastructure or a municipality to control every street light wirelessly from a laptop. The lights with the specific capabilities can be dimmed or shut off in specific areas to save money such as parks and ball fields after hours which avoids having to have town employees to go out and do the work manually. The specific systems as designed can automatically notify the systems controller when a light is not functioning. This allows the municipality to remotely find out when street lights are out. This also allows the municipality to save money in that it is only paying for the street lights that are lit (as we currently pay or all the lights in town whether they are on or off) and it also allows more cost saving in not having to have maintenance personnel driving around looking for lights to replace; the system can not only identify the lights that are out but when the locations are fed into an online route mapping system it can lay out a work flow for the shift outlining the most efficient travel route to all the required maintenance.

In order for the town and the Wallingford Electric Division to leverage the benefit both will have to make a decision on the technology and then make the investment for the long term realized savings.

This would be on a smaller scale today, but in a similar example, of what earlier citizens of Wallingford did when they made the leap at the time to make a long term investment in a municipal electric company and a generation and distribution system in Wallingford; doing so allowed generations of residents to benefit from lower electrical rates that still exist today.

Upgrading to newer and more efficient, long term, money saving technologies is the next natural progression step in that effort.