The supermarket giant, which reported underlying profits of £681 million last year, will use the cash to install LEDs in its stores and car parks around the country.
A spokesman said the taxpayer cash made up "a small part" of its wider LED installation programme.
The funding, which will help companies cut their energy bills, comes after ministers scaled back schemes to help households improve their energy efficiency.
Lisa Nandy, Labour's shadow energy secretary, said: "Instead of spending taxpayers’ money paying Sainsbury’s to change their light bulbs, ministers should be supporting lasting schemes like home insulation that cut emissions and cut household bills."
Travis Perkins, the FTSE 100-listed builders' merchant, said the £27,500 it had been awarded would be used to install LEDs at a Wickes distribution centre, and would cover 22 per cent of the cost of the upgrade.
The company is also considering installing LED lighting in Wickes stores without taxpayer help, Jez Cutler, its head of environment, said.
High street electrical retailer Dixons Carphone said it would use its £25,422 taxpayer funding to help install energy efficient LED lighting at its distribution centre in Newark, a project costing £500,000 in total.
A number of companies qualified for the scheme via an installation company, Energys Group, which secured £2.4 million of funding for its clients.
"If businesses don’t need as much electricity, then consumers don’t have to pay as much for expensive back up power stations."
Department of Energy and Climate Change
Kevin Cox, its managing director, said he believed installing LEDs should make commercial sense for companies even without taxpayer cash, but that the take-up was “frighteningly low”.
The scheme was a cost-effective way of reducing the demand strain on the UK’s energy grid given “the pressure it's going to be under next winter and the risk of brownouts”, he said.
Jonathan Isaby, of the TaxPayers' Alliance said that “urgent action” was needed to tackle the energy crunch but that “handing out millions of pounds to huge companies already trying to cut costs to nudge them into changing their light bulbs hardly seems like a solution or money well spent”.
“Ministers need to stop messing around with silly schemes like this and create a decent investment climate so that generation capacity can be increased before the lights go out,” he said.
A spokesman for the DECC said: "If businesses don’t need as much electricity, then consumers don’t have to pay as much for expensive back up power stations.
"That’s why this project is looking at whether we can keep bills down by encouraging charities, local councils and companies to install more energy efficient equipment."
To qualify for funding, companies had to show that it would otherwise take more than two years for them to recoup the cost of their investment through energy bill savings.
On average, the taxpayer funding represented less than 10 per cent of the cost of the works being undertaken.
Source: http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/579309/s/4d486954/sc/28/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cnews0Cearth0Cenergy0C121350A370CBig0Ebusinesses0Ehanded0Etaxpayer0Ecash0Eto0Einstall0Eenergy0Esaving0Elightbulbs0Bhtml/story01.htm