babe138 Virtual Reality Casino Information

Prior to the recent economic downturn, commercial casinos collected at the least $30 billion in revenues annually from 2005 through 2008.1 In this period, US casino owners built new facilities and expanded how big their existing facilities. As a result of the economic downturn, new US commercial casino construction has arrived at a screeching halt and casino operators are now actually centered on existing facility cost reduction. Increasingly, casino operators are benefiting from the EPAct IRC section 179(D) commercial building energy efficiency tax provisions, which were extended through 2013. EPAct tax deductions are available for qualifying energy reductions in lighting, HVAC(heating, ventilation, and air conditioning), and building envelope. (Building envelope contains the building's foundation, walls, roof, windows, and doors, which control the flow of energy between the inner and exterior of the building.)

Commercial casinos often encompass hotel resorts, which provide attractive packages of services because of their corporate and family customers. Casinos are particularly worthy of EPAct for their large gaming floors, hotel occupancy rooms, meeting halls, and parking garages. Each one of these features typically consumes large square footage and the EPAct benefit has a potential for approximately 60 cents per square foot for all the three measures described above. Some of the smallest commercial casinos are about 50,000 square feet while most American casinos are generally over 100,000 square feet. One of the largest ones, MGM Grand on the Las Vegas strip is practically 2 million square feet. Hotels themselves are the absolute most favored of Section 179 building category. (See "Hotels and Motels Most Favored Energy Policy Act Tax Properties")

It's common to consider commercial casinos as situated in two states Nevada and New Jersey. Although it does work that both of these states have the largest commercial casino revenues, you will find 12 states with commercial casinos in the United States, the other commercial casino states are: Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota. Members of the American Gaming Association have publicized some of the commitments to energy reduction. Reporting casinos include Boyd Gaming Corporation, Harrah's Entertainment, Inc., and MGM Mirage. They've projects such as significant energy savings via cogeneration, ERV(energy recovery ventilation), more effective HVAC units, replacing incandescent lights with energy efficient lightings, windows with energy efficient day lighting systems, solar thermal storage and numerous other energy saving initiatives.

The underlying rule set to qualify for the Section 179D lighting tax deduction makes casinos and particularly casino hotels the absolute most favored property category for the tax babe138 incentive. The rule set requires at the very least a 25% watts-per-square foot reduction as compared to the 2001 ASHRAE (American Society of Heating Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers) building energy code standard. Full tax deduction is achieved with a 40% watts-per-square foot reduction set alongside the ASHRAE 2001 standard. The ASHRAE 2004 hotel/motel building code standard requires 40% wattage reduction, meaning any hotel or motel lighting installation that meets that building code requirement will automatically qualify for the most EPAct tax deduction.

For most other building categories, the Section 179D tax provisions require compliance with the bi-level switching requirement. The comparison is always centered on wired rather than plug-in lighting. Casino hotel occupancy rooms have an important advantage in that they often use plug-in lighting, and since these rooms work as hotel and motel spaces, they are specifically excluded from the tax bi-level switching requirement. Since occupant rooms are generally one of the larger spaces in hotel casinos, casinos are usually able to use energy efficient lighting to generate large EPAct tax deductions for the facility. Casinos frequently have large kitchen, storage, and laundry (so called back of the house) spaces which have historically used T-12 fluorescent lighting. This lighting is so energy inefficient compared to today's lighting products that it will soon be illegal to manufacture in the United States after July 1, 2010.4 Once manufacturing of those prior generation lighting products ceases, the expense of replacing these inefficient bulbs will increase. Simply stated, casinos should consider acting now to replace these lighting fixtures to save lots of both energy and lamp replacement costs. The EPAct lighting tax incentive may be used to deal with the opportunities related to these legally mandated product changes

These regions of casinos have historically used designer type lighting that is energy inefficient and often extremely expensive to keep and replace. In particular, replacing bulbs and lamps in high ceilings is too costly since expensive mobile hydraulic platform equipment must be rented or purchased to take care of the replacements. New lighting products and, in particular, light emitting diode (LED) products, use a fraction of the energy and have a much longer useful life and are now substituted. The mixture of large energy cost reduction, operating cost reductions, utility rebates and EPAct tax deductions can greatly improve the economic payback from these more costly lighting upgrades. Many casinos have large adjoining parking garages that could save substantial energy costs and generate large tax deductions by upgrading to energy efficient fixtures. In Notice 2008-40 issued March 7th, 2008, the IRS announced that parking garages are a house class that is specifically eligible for utilize the EPAct tax deductions. Also, parking garages are excluded from the tax bi-level switching requirement. Please begin to see the September, 2008 International Parking Institute article devoted to parking garages EPAct lighting deduction tax opportunities.5

One of the biggest energy users on hotel gaming floors is slot machines. Although these were early adapters of fluorescent technology, even these energy efficient bulbs normally need to be changed 3 times annually due to 24/7 operating hours. As a result of high labor maintenance costs, casino owners are actually transitioning to LED technology in their slot machines. LED's, while they've higher at the start costs, have high energy efficiency and much longer life cycle, offering significant savings in labor and maintenance costs. Casinos due to their typical 24 hour occupancy can achieve significant energy cost savings from energy efficient HVAC systems. Particularly, Nevada's hot climate further makes energy efficient HVAC a really worthwhile investment. Fortunately. Nevada with the greatest revenues from casinos has America's second highest convenience of energy efficiency through renewable geothermal energy.6 Certain kinds of very efficient HVAC investments will often qualify for the HVAC EPAct tax incentive including geothermal and thermal storage.