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Ryan Thorpe, director of operations at the Oregon Convention Center, noted a strange phenomenon as he approached the entrance to Exhibit Hall C last week.

“See the glow under those doors?” Thorpe said, pointing to a strip of white light flashing onto the carpet. “It didn’t used to do that.”

The brighter lights in the exhibit hall use less power, yet pack a bigger wallop than their predecessors, Thorpe said. They were replaced, along with more than 2,000 other lights in the massive building, as part of a $760,000 project that wrapped up on Friday.

“This will save us about $130,000 a year – that’s what we’re hoping, anyway; that’s what the estimates say,” Thorpe said.

Beyond the energy and related cost savings, the project also will save the center 1,034 tons worth of carbon dioxide emissions annually.

“For us it’s a triple bottom line of job creation, carbon savings and fiscal savings,” Thorpe said.

Unfortunately, though, the fiscal savings won’t go as far as initially planned, because Pacific Power increased its rates by 16 percent on Jan. 1, Thorpe added.

“It’s going to be a wash with that 16 percent increase, but that said, I’d be paying a lot more if we didn’t do this,” he said.

The Oregon Convention Center opened in 1990 and expanded in 2003. At 1 million square feet, it is the largest convention center in the Pacific Northwest.

Workers from Salem-based Cherry City Electric started changing the lights and fixtures in the building – and across its high ceilings – in mid-January.

In some places, such as the exhibition halls, 1,000-watt lights and fixtures were replaced with 100-watt ones – yet the result is that rooms are as bright or brighter than they were before, said Paul Worman, a journeyman electrician who’s been with the company for 11 years.

“It’s a better quality light, it’s brighter and it’s a different type of light – the new lights are whiter, where the old ones were kind of yellowish,” Worman said.

In several hallways, 250-watt halogen bulbs and fixtures were replaced with 70-watt ones, and with 39-watt ones in other places.

“What they had here before was all the same,” Worman said, as he straightened out wires on a set of fixtures. “Some of these new ones are metal halide. They’re all super long lasting and very efficient.”

Other lights in the project include induction, compact fluorescent and LED lighting. Overall, the project is estimated to save the Oregon Convention Center about 2.7 million kilowatt-hours of power per year, Thorpe said.

“It took a while to get the funding together, but the result is noticeably different,” Thorpe said. “It looks better. It’s a cooler (colored) sort of light.”

Funding for the project came from a combination of sources, including the federal government, the Energy Trust of Oregon, the Oregon Department of Energy and the Oregon Convention Center, which kicked in about $125,000.

Oregon Convention Center officials have been planning for the project since August 2009, when they began applying for grants, Thorpe added.

Part of the process also focused on maintaining the look of the former lighting fixtures, including a metal, bell-shaped shell, in the exhibit rooms.

“The new fixtures – they’re all sealed, but they look the same,” Thorpe said. “That was the important part to me.”