Tulsa’s KOTV Goes Green with New Building

By Kevin Eck 

Griffin Communications will be doing its part for the environment with its new 57,000 square foot broadcasting center for its stations, CBS affiliate KOTV and CW affiliate KQCW.

Anyone who has stepped inside a TV studio can imagine the amount of power needed to keep the studio cool and the incandescent lights burning.  Griffin’s Tulsa building will feature geothermal heating and cooling and LED studio lighting to reduce energy costs and efficiency.

“The use of LED lighting instruments on our set will reduce our lighting power requirement alone by over 90% from previously-employed incandescent and fluorescent fixtures,”Griffin’s chairman and chief executive officer David Griffin in a statement.

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TVNewsCheck details how the building’s geothermal energy is set up,

The system includes 32, 500-foot wells in a geothermal field under the employee parking lot.  The system circulates water from the building into the geothermal field, where it’s always 64 degrees. In the field, the water is either heated or cooled to 64 degrees before being pumped back inside the building and into overhead heat exchangers.  Because of the wells, it cost twice as much as a conventional system to install, but only half the cost to operate.

“We wanted our new facility to have a positive impact on our environment by significantly reducing our energy usage and environmental footprint,” said Griffin.

The building is expected to be ready for move in by the middle of January.

Here’s a story KOTV ran about the start of construction:

[TVNewsCheck][newson6.com]

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