What comes to mind when you think of a building automation system (BAS)? Chances are, HVAC is the first thing that pops up. There’s a reason why.
Lighting systems have traditionally been seen as separate from BAS. Often, that siloing starts with construction, when lighting is approached as a stand-alone installation under the purview of electrical and apart from building controls. As such, lighting is typically designed, installed, and commissioned by the electrical contractor as part of their scope. Makes total sense. Or does it?
The reality is, in today’s complex and intelligent commercial building landscape, lighting should be seen as an integral part of the overall building’s automated systems. When integrated with the BAS, lighting can deliver significant advantages including lower energy consumption and utility bills, improved building performance, streamlined efficiencies, greater visibility, and enhanced occupant safety and experience. Let’s dive into each of those a bit deeper.
Lighting Controls Drive Energy Savings
BAS isn’t just for HVAC anymore. Indeed, today’s modern automation systems can also control multiple facets of a property’s lighting to help buildings operate more efficiently and responsively.
Lighting represents one of the largest non-HVAC energy loads in commercial properties. Indeed, after space heating, lighting ties with ventilation as the second highest source of energy usage in U.S. commercial buildings.1 And, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program, lighting consumes close to 35% of the electricity used in U.S. commercial buildings.2 That’s pretty significant.
But when integrated with your BAS, lighting can be an effective tool for driving down energy usage and utility bills. Your BAS can control both interior and exterior/site lighting, synchronizing them with occupancy schedules and time of day/year to conserve electricity and reduce utility bills.
Your BAS can schedule on/off or dimming functions for after hours and holidays to prevent unnecessary use. It can also harvest natural daylight to reduce the amount of electric light needed, ensuring spaces are well-lit while also saving energy. And it can reduce, shift, or turn off lighting levels in selected areas, for example in unused conference rooms, to stagger loads and cut peak demand.
All of these can result in substantial energy reductions. In fact, a comprehensive study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reported 38% energy savings from combined lighting control strategies that included occupancy-based control and daylight harvesting.3
Other data shows a 49% in energy savings, as high as 64% for offices and 68% for warehouses, from the use of integrated lighting controls.4 And researchers at UC Davis revealed that a whole-building integration, including lighting and HVAC, lowered annual energy consumption by more than 35%.5
Bolstering Overall Building Performance
Integrating your lighting systems with the BAS can also drive improved HVAC performance and efficiency. When occupancy sensors, schedules, and lighting status are shared with HVAC, the building knows when to stop conditioning empty spaces, adjusts ventilation more accurately, and avoids running heating or cooling where it is not needed.
Knowing which areas are occupied and how lighting is being used, the BAS can reduce electrical demand during peak events by coordinating both lighting and HVAC functions instead of treating them as separate systems. That can make the building more grid-responsive while minimizing disruption to occupants.
And with access to lighting occupancy data, the BAS can control VAV dampers, temperature setpoints, or other zone responses based on actual use. In fact, studies show that occupancy sensors can capture up to 30% energy savings for commercial buildings.6 Lighting becomes a source of real-time space-use intelligence for the rest of the building.
Streamlined Efficiencies and Improved Productivity
Integrating lighting into the BAS improves the performance of your facilities department as well as the building’s systems. With an integrated BAS, your team now has one place to monitor and control lighting as well as other building systems. This saves them the time and hassle of managing separate lighting panels, manual schedules, and one-off alerts.
Without the need to manage separate lighting controls, you can simplify training, monitoring, and troubleshooting. You’ll also see improved response times by allowing staff to spot abnormal lighting issues quickly before occupants complain, and without the need for walk-throughs.
A BAS that includes lighting additionally allows your facilities team to automate a range of time-consuming manual tasks. Lighting can be set to automatically adjust to occupancy levels, time-of-day schedules, and peak load times so your staff spends less time manually turning lights on and off and troubleshooting after hours. If an issue does crop up, your team can remotely access a centralized dashboard to diagnose and troubleshoot. The time you save can be better spent on other high-value work.
Better Visibility into Performance
When lighting is tied into the BAS, facilities teams gain greater visibility into how the system is performing. So instead of relying on guesswork or legwork, you can make informed decisions based on runtime tracking, alarm notifications, trend data that reveals patterns, and energy usage.
What might this look like? Let’s say your building has west-facing windows. In the afternoon, the BAS analyzes trend data and recognizes that those zones are getting ample daylight. In response, the BAS dims the perimeter lights, logs the reduced runtime, and flags any fixtures or zones that are staying on longer than they need to — giving you the data you need to reduce energy usage and lower costs.
Or let’s say, you access the BAS dashboard and see that a specific conference room is showing lighting use long after business hours. Alerted to the issue, you can search for and address the root cause: a scheduling problem, or faulty sensor, or a security guard who flicks on the light during his rounds and forgets to turn it off.
The more you can see about your lighting systems, the more you know. And the faster you can make the right decisions.
Enhancing Occupant Safety and Experience
A BAS that includes lighting can make it easier for facilities to keep people comfortable and safe, which in turn enhances occupant experience and satisfaction. As part of the BAS, lighting can respond automatically to actual conditions inside the building as opposed to staying in a fixed state.
For example, if a person is working late, the BAS can keep the appropriate lights on to help them feel secure as well as productive. Or in the event of an emergency, the BAS can turn on interior and exterior lights to reveal hazards, provide easier evacuation, and give first responders better visibility. As part of the BAS, lighting can adjust according to occupancy, daylight, and schedules so people don’t have to walk into dark rooms or get hit with harsh, glaring lights.
Occupant safety and comfort extend outside the building as well. BAS integration ensures that parking lots, walkways, stairways, loading docks, outside areas, building perimeters, and other high-risk areas are appropriately lit after dark for increased visibility and security.
When and How to Integrate Lighting with BAS
The ideal time to integrate lighting with the BAS is during the construction and design phase, before the systems are installed and commissioned. The earlier in the process the lighting engineer and BAS engineer can coordinate sequences, choose compatible protocols, and decide the best path for integration, the better.
Lighting controls need to be programmed, tested, and commissioned with the rest of the building systems. That work becomes much more streamlined when planned into the project from the start. When lighting and BAS are designed together, the facility team also benefits, with one cohesive system to train on, monitor, and maintain, rather than separate platforms that may not communicate well with each other.
That being said, integration can be done after the fact as well, without necessarily needing a full rip and replace. A layered integration can make it possible to connect your existing lighting system to your BAS through gateways, relays, or network interfaces.
- Gateways: Retrofitting with Modbus, BACNet, and other common gateways can help minimize rewiring, make the best use of existing fixtures and controls, and often requires no ceiling demolition.
- Relays: For conventional, centrally switched lighting systems, a lighting relay or smart panel may be the right approach. This strategy comes with a moderate cost, offers good scalability, and can minimize disruption since most of the work can be limited to electrical rooms rather than occupied spaces.
- Wireless Lighting Controls: Wireless systems are becoming an increasingly popular path to integration, since it avoids having to open walls or ceilings. With wireless technologies like Bluetooth Mesh or Zigbee, the BAS can connect through a lighting controller or a cloud/API integration. This approach can be minimally disruptive, faster to install, and support future expansion. But there may also be interoperability and proprietary limitations.
- Occupancy Sensor Levels: This low-cost option employs occupancy sensors as shared data points for lighting and HVAC systems. Lights are triggered by occupancy, which also enables the BAS to adjust HVAC usage. This can significantly reduce energy costs without having to replace fixtures.
Finding the Right Path for Your BAS/Lighting Integration
Whether you’re planning new construction or looking to integrate your current lighting and BAS, consulting with an expert is a good place to start. Reach out to your local Albireo Energy representative, and we’ll discuss your goals, current situation, and the best path forward to maximize the performance advantages of lighting and BAS integration.
1Sources-
- “2018 Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey.” U.S. Energy Information Administration. U.S. Department of Energy. December 2022.
2. U.S. General Services Administration. October 6, 2025.
3. Williams, Alison A. et al. “Quantifying National Energy Savings Potential of Lighting Controls in Commercial Buildings.” Energy Efficiency Studies. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. May 5, 2012.
4. Schuetter, Scott et al. “Building Systems: Networked Lighting Controls and HVAC Integration.” Slipstream. 2024.
5. “Smarter Buildings, Lower Bills: The Power of Whole-Building Integration.” CalNEXT: IBSC Final Report. UC Davis Energy and Efficiency Institute. February 20, 2025.
6. Zhihong, Pang et al. “Adopting Occupancy-based HVAC Controls in Commercial Building Energy Codes: Analysis of Cost-effectiveness and Decarbonization Potential.” Applied Energy. Volume 349. November 2023. ↩︎
