Orion Energy Lights Path To Big Energy Reductions

Apollo News Service

Orion Energy Systems, a Wisconsin manufacturer of energy-efficient light fixtures, controls, and other renewable energy technologies is viewed by state officials and industrial executives as something of a Midwest darling. In 2001, just five years after it opened its doors, the clean energy company won the Wisconsin Emerging Company of the Year award. Three years later came the Wisconsin Small Business of the Year award.

This year, Orion Energy, which operates production plants in Manitowoc, where the company is based, and in Plymouth, took the Wisconsin Manufacturers of the Year award. It also was honored with Platts Global Energy Award for the single most innovative and sustainable green technology of 2008.

Orion offers competitive wages to its staff of 280, plus employee healthcare that is 100-percent company-funded. It also takes a couple of distinctive steps to care for its workers, such as providing fresh fruit to its manufacturing workers.

Manitowoc Expansion

In 2005, Orion purchased 266,000 square feet in Manitowoc’s Mirro Aluminum Company plant, a maker of aluminum cookware that had operated in the region since 1885 but had shipped its manufacturing operations overseas. Over 1,000 people lost their jobs. Orion has steadily hired some of those workers for its Manitowoc plant. One of them is Scott Jensen, the chief financial officer, who said he appreciates the job security that Orion and its made-in-America values now provides.

“I learned that I never wanted to go through that again,” said Jensen. “A lot of people there had been with the company for 25-30 years and had never worked anywhere else. All of a sudden you found yourself in the job market again. I enjoy working for a company now that’s more interested in retaining jobs than sending jobs overseas.”

Underlying the company’s rapid growth is the Illuminator, a high-intensity fluorescent technology that doubles light levels while reducing electricity by more than 50 percent. It also allows companies to retrofit their plants’ lighting at lower cost.

The technology was designed by Neal Verfuerth, Orion’s chief executive officer, who proved his invention in 2002 when the company retrofitted the Bemis Manufacturing Sheboygan campus in Wisconsin, shocking the local utility company when energy consumption dropped by 7 percent.

All About Innovation

Other industrial companies took notice. In 2005, Orion began lighting General Electric facilities, and signed a contract to light more than 500 Coca Cola facilities in North America. Today it works with 90 Fortune 500 companies including Kraft Foods, SYSCO Foods, Toyota and Newell Rubbermaid to improve their lighting efficiency.

Orion said in February it has provided energy efficient light systems to 4,387 facilities, completing 1,000 of those project just in the last year. Its revenue in 2008 was $80.7 million, or $32.5 million more than in 2007.

“In the early days the company focused on the hospitality and agriculture sectors, a natural fit since we’re located in Wisconsin,” says Jensen. “But we realized that the larger opportunity was in the commercial industry. Many facilities had used the same lighting for 20 years, and even if they tried energy-efficient techniques, they were unable to fit the old with the new.”

Verfuerth understood that retrofit lighting was the future. Orion worked to improve light output and reduce costs by 50 percent.” The company is well positioned to benefit from the economic stimulus, which provides $34 billion over the next two years to spur energy efficiency in homes, government buildings, and other installations.

“Companies that are conscious about driving down costs and looking at solid investments at a very good return are flocking to us,” says Jensen. “We believe we can do things as cost-competitively as anyone else in world.”