Mark Law

Tesco uses one per cent of the UK’s energy. Its head of lighting Mark Law is responsible for a staggering four million lamps

What does your job mean in lighting terms?
I’m responsible for delivering all engineering projects for Tesco business, 30 per cent of which covers lighting. That involves about 2,000 stores, one million light fittings and four million lamps.

What’s the most important issue facing you?
To deliver the most energy efficient and cost-effective lighting. We account for roughly one per cent of the UK’s energy usage and we’re committed to reducing our carbon footprint by 50 per cent by 2020. It’s a huge task. Since last October we’ve fitted more than 300,000 Eco lamps. We’ve carried out trials of LEDs for car parks and petrol stations, all freezer lighting is LEDs, and so is all our signage. There’s no viable LED solution yet for in-store lighting in terms of output or cost. Each year we build three or four environmental stores where we evaluate all the latest technologies. We delivered a 12 per cent energy reduction last year and are on track to deliver another 10 per cent this year.

“Compared with the thousands of complaints I’ve had that stores are too dark, I could probably name the people who’ve said they were too bright”

Aren’t supermarkets overlit? Wouldn’t reducing lux levels save energy?
We light to 900 lux which is in line with the Cibse recommendation. Retailers like it bright. Compared with the thousands of complaints I’ve had that stores are too dark, I could probably name the people who’ve said they were too bright. I’ve got 80 ‘dark’ stores, about 500 or 600 lux, that have to be brought up to our design standard. I have 11 weeks to sort that out. But in all our environmental stores we use Dali. There we drop the level down 60 per cent between 10pm to 7am even if the store is trading. To have stores operating at only 600 lux was a big step change.

What’s the strategy for lighting different areas of the stores?
The way we light is uniform across the whole area. We’ve removed spots from most shops. We are moving away from different colour temperatures. Most of our lighting is 4000K. We uses to use 3000K ceramic metal halide and white SON to get better colour rendering, but now it’s a much more standard look.

What will supermarket lighting look like in 10 years?
It will be highly efficient, highly controlled and use a mixture of fluorescent and LEDs, and emerging technologies such as plasma. They’ll definitely be more daylight. I think stores will be less bright, but it’s going to be a gradual process.

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