The public establishment Paris La Défense (PLD), manager of the business district, announced at the end of September that it wanted to reduce its electricity consumption by 15% this winter.
A goal that involves, among other things, switching off the lights of its offices at night.
The project was established after a meeting which brought together the 400 actors and managers of the business district.
Turning off office lights at night is a gesture that has been mandatory since a decree of 2013, since repealed but continued by a second decree of December 2018. In detail, this text provides for the extinction of the interior lighting of premises at professional use one hour after their end of occupation.
Le Parisien visited the business district a month apart, at the end of September and then at the end of October, to take stock of the follow-up to these measures.
Read alsoLa Défense commits (finally) to turning off its offices at night
For the general manager of Paris La Défense, “the message of vigilance has already brought first fruits since certain buildings have started to put in place, by behavior or by automatic devices, the extinction of their offices at night”.
Among the measures recommended by Paris La Défense is also the optimization of the use of lighting thanks to the EcoWatt signal or the installation of clocks which make it possible to automatically turn off the lights after "7 p.m. or 8 p.m.", explains Pierre-Yves Guice. .
The director general of Paris La Défense mentions in particular the examples of the Areva tower or the Sequoia tower, which houses the Ministry of Ecological Transition, as “good students”.
When Le Parisien went to La Défense, at the end of September and then at the end of October, only a few windows of these buildings were still lit, after 10:30 p.m.
Another good student, underlined by Pierre-Yves Guice: the Westfield Les 4 Temps shopping center, which "reacted very quickly, by installing automatic extinguishing devices and implementing a set of small gestures".
The colored lights that still decorated one of the facades of the shopping center in September were turned off between our two visits to La Défense.
However, efforts are still needed, says Anne-Marie Ducroux, president of the ANPCEN association, which fights against light pollution.
"Between September and October, the progress does not seem to be completely obvious", explains Anne-Marie Ducroux, to whom we showed our sequences shot a month apart.
Initiatives still considered too “one-off”
The president of ANPCEN points in particular to several office lights that remained on in the Cœur Défense tower after 10 p.m.
"We can still reasonably assume that not all the people are working in this building," she says.
While regulations require managers of high-rise buildings to leave 50% of emergency escape routes lit, such as lobbies and elevator landings for safety reasons, lights in unoccupied offices must be extinguished one hour after the departure of the last employee, and this for almost... 10 years.
“There must be lighting management problems, assumes Anne-Marie Ducroux.
All this probably shows to be modular enough to comply with regulations and common sense.
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For the president of the ANPCEN, "we see that it is possible to do better but that these remain initiatives which seem to be quite specific and which are not yet those of the collective".
“There are companies that also work at night, with professions that require it, tempers Pierre-Yves Guice.
But it's true that sometimes this message of conviction and mobilization still has to carry and materialize on the ground”.