POSITION: CEO
COMPANY: Lamar Advertising
WHAT THEY DO: Reach driving audiences through billboards, bus shelters, benches and buses, and create highway logo signs
REVENUE: $1.09 billion in 2010
NEXT GOAL: Continue the rapid deployment of digital billboards
The “aha” moment
Bobby Switzer, who is Lamar’s vice president of operations and who also is Sean Reilly’s cousin, had been experimenting with solar panels on a few of the company’s billboards in Florida for more than a decade. Lamar applied for green industry grants from the state in 2008; the company’s proposal scored well, but Florida ran out of money for the program. When the U.S. Department of Energy requested proposals in 2009 for shovel-ready projects that would create green jobs and promote the use of alternative energy, offering a 20-cent subsidy for every dollar of private investment, Lamar was poised to receive grants in Florida and Louisiana.
R&D
By using solar panels and a new generation of efficient LED lighting, Lamar’s billboards annually can save and/or generate about 2.6 million kilowatt hours of electricity, Reilly says, which is enough to power 225 average-sized homes and reduce the company’s carbon footprint by more than 1,500 tons per year. The company has a net metering arrangement with the power companies—in Louisiana’s case, Entergy—because the signs will draw power from the grid at night but generate power during the day.
Hitting the market
The Florida project represents about a $12 million investment for about 1,500 billboards. In Louisiana, the cost will be about $10 million for slightly more than 1,000 signs, with deployment scheduled to begin this month. As part of the deal with DOE, Lamar sponsored a website, renewablelouisiana.org, which provides information about renewable energy resources, and will promote the site with 100 public-service billboards. Lamar’s electric bill is $35 million to $45 million per year, and chipping away at that amount is important to the company’s shareholders, Reilly says, adding that he expects the solar panels will pay for themselves in seven to eight years.
Reilly says
“We’ve always prided ourselves on being at the forefront of technological change, in particular green technology change. Our advertisers like that. The right combination of us being far enough along in our research and the Department of Energy dollars being available convinced us, ‘Let’s go. Let’s go big.'”
