Posts Tagged ‘industrial led lighting’

The switch: Lightfair becomes LEDfair

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Attendees witnessed a dramatic shift at this week’s Lightfair 2010, the lighting industry’s most visible, 20th annual conference and tradeshow – LED’s have become the dominant lighting technology in virtually every session, presentation and vendor booth.  Goodbye fluorescent, halogen, high intensity discharge, induction, you’re all passe’, OLEDs your time will come….

While Lightfair 2009 was a coming out party for LED’s, this year EVERY possible lighting application, from 2 watt dimmable candelabras to 200 watt street lighting, was on display.  LED chip performance has increased another 30% since last year and manufacturers have seen the proverbial light.  UL’s engineering teams are now overwhelmed with the volume of pending new applications they need to review.

Even the big lighting guys are now embracing LEDs.  Where only Philips was showing a wide variety of LED products a few years ago, now Acuity, Cooper and GE are all LED centric in their marketing.  Other large consumer electronics companies, with no history in the US lighting market, are in the game too.  Toshiba is going after the whole sector with chips and fixtures, while Sanyo is offerings LED components.  Micron and other similar players will shortly be entering the market as well.  And don’t forget the 150 start ups going after each LED fixture sub-category.

That’s not to say everyone is happy.  The DOE Solid State Lab (DOESSL) is pretty exasperated.  They’re doing their best to get ahead of the craze by establishing referenceable standards for LED fixture design and performance, but the market is moving too fast.  The DOESSL wants to avoid problems like in the early 1990’s, when the first and the worst CFL’s came with flickering, weird color quality and slow starts.  And with limited technical review for commercial lighting products, the EPA’s Energy Star program (which they took over from the DOE six months ago) will not solve this problem.

DOESSL’s standards, such as LM79 for fixture photometrics, LM80 for the LED chip performance and L70 for in situation lifetime testing have all been introduced. But these won’t inhibit manufacturers’ temptation from massaging their DOESSL performance reporting while pursuing their first mover market advantage.  Unlike simply inserting a lamp and a ballast into fixture, an LED fixture requires a system design.  Bad system design will take some time to play out.  But for now the DOE is losing the war, as designers and customers are making their own decisions in the rush to adopt LEDs.

Which is why it’s no surprise that this year’s event boasted both record attendance and number of exhibitors.  Of the 450+ vendors showing their wares at least 250 of them were showing LED based products.  If you passed by an exhibit without LED’s you couldn’t help feeling sorry for that vendor – and imagining they might not be back for the party at LEDfair 2011.

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Digital Lumens’ first LED customer installs

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

Now that Digital Lumens (DL) is out of stealth mode it makes sense for us to start covering some of our learnings with LED high wattage applications.

Beginning last year we conducted a series of DL test trials with our customers.  Recently we exhibited at the IARW show as a “coming out” party, showing both the now shipping DL system and a short video from our first large installation at a yet-to-be-announced freezer cold storage facility.

Prior to our DL tests we had learned that operating managers had three general concerns about LED high wattage applications – (1) light level performance, (2) cost and (3) glare.

Digging into each….

Light level performance:   Some companies had previously conducted experiments with LED fixtures and found that they way underperformed versus their existing lighting systems.  Two things worked in our favor during our tests:   (1) DL’s system design and (2) LED’s love the cold.  The foot-candle performance we measured was way above our customer’s current systems, this coming from DL’s integrated system design using the latest high performance LED chips and the fact that these environments run at below zero degrees, where solid state chips thrive.

Cost:  LED fixtures are expensive – still true.  But unlike traditional freezer storage high wattage HID and HIF lighting (which don’t turn off because they’ll literally freeze) the DL system does something really complicated – it turns off when no one is there.  Then it turns right on when someone arrives.  Then it turns off 30 seconds after they leave.  $ee the Light?  Since occupancy rates in these balmy environments are typically low (less than 10%) DL’s embedded data logging capability confirmed that lighting kWh is reduced to a stunningly low number – from 8760 hours a year to less than 800.   Plus every watt removed reduced the cooling cost for the facility.  Which makes the economic return that much more attractive.  Oh, and there are utility rebates too.

Glare:  Brighter, point source LED’s in high wattage can generate perceived glare, impacting operators and workers.  Some people affectionately call them glare bombs.  Here the DL system uniquely offers beam shaping, which allows us to use the LED directionality to our advantage, shining light where we need it and pointing it away from the operator’s eyes.   This is very impactful – no other LED system we’ve found (and we’ve studied them all) has ANY variability on it’s light pattern – meaning these designs assume all environments are identical in where they need the light?  You get the picture.  So the DL beam shaping lets us adapt on the fly to the specific site and its operators.

All of this is best captured through a video clip from our installation – take a look here.

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Digital Lumens – congrats on DOE award!

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

In 2006 Groom Energy engineers began testing the latest general illumination LED fixtures with our early adopter customers.  Our demonstrations proved that these products were still too expensive, couldn’t produce enough foot-candles and had no track record to support their 100,000 hour operating life claims.  More importantly, none of the them took advantage of what LEDs do best – intelligent control.

These early LED systems, designed by traditional HIF/HID lighting engineers, were burdened with bad design DNA.  Their designers literally shape reflective metal around lamps and ballasts from GE, Philips and Sylvania, not layout circuit boards for a solid state lighting systems.  Even the most basic HIF/HID control features need to come from third party companies.

High performance, intelligent LED systems require an interdisciplinary design team who can optimize the entire system, simultaneously considering  optics, thermal, mechanics, power and control.  It’s more like designing a computer than metal bending.  No team like that existed.

So in 2007 Groom Energy set out to do this ourselves.

We recruited a small world class team into a separate company, initially calling it GroomLED, co-locating the team in our Salem office (later we renamed it Digital Lumens.)  Our goal was to develop LED based lighting systems for high wattage applications in our customer’s commercial and industrial environments.  We took the DL team on the road with our customers, confirming product requirements with each of them.

Our friends at Flybridge Capital took the risk with us, providing the initial seed venture capital in order to test the company idea.  Since then the press has unconfirmed reports noting two follow-on DL venture capital fundings, one with Flybridge and Stata Ventures in May 2009 and a second with Black Coral Capital in December 2009.

Although DL continues to operate in stealth mode, we were excited this past week when DL was awarded a prize at a Next Generation Luminaires Solid State Lighting Design Competition, jointly sponsored by the Department of Energy SLL Lab , IESNA and IALD.

Stay tuned – there will be more DL announcements over the coming months, but at this point we wanted to give props to DL and answer the inbound questions we’ve been receiving…

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LED Webinar 5.21

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

Groom Energy hosted a webinar on May 21st entitled “Trends and Best Practices using LED light sources in Commercial, Industrial and Outdoor applications.” This event was driven from the many conversations, questions and engagements we have had with our commercial and industrial customers, like, “are LED’s the answer for my industrial application?” “How soon until LEDs will be competitive with fluorescent light sources?” ” Which applications have been successful and which have not, and why?”….. we attempted to answer a few of these questions using this broad forum and maybe to provide clarity to some of the claims from providers.

Joining me in the presentation were Mark McClear from CREE and Jeff McCullough from PNNL. The session was very well attended, far better than we had anticipated. Mark gave a good historical view of where LED light sources have come from, where they are now and where he (and CREE) anticipates them to be in the short term.   I presented a synopsis of Groom’s observations of the commercial and industrial marketplace from our customer’s perspective. The requirements and challenges they face and the many questions they pose to us.  I reveiwed 4 specific case studies which hit specific different types of applications, Indoor, Roadway, Parking, and Tunnel, and the results/benefits of these installs. Jeff gave an excellent overview and detailed the effort to provide standards around the myriad of claims in the market regarding LED light sources and fixtures.

What is apparent is that there is tremendous interest in LEDs as a hugely efficient light source for the future. Along with that come a ton of questions and the need to provide expert guidance. The comments from the session seem to be positive so far, and we continue to try and provide guidance and leadership to our customers in this area. Stay tuned for more!

The webinar is currently archived on the Greentechmedia site so you’ll just need to register here in order to view it anytime for the next 6 months.

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Commercial/Industrial LED Webinar on May 21st, 2009

Friday, May 8th, 2009

Register here for our webinar on LED Lighting presented by Groom Energy and Greentech Media!

A great opportunity to learn about trends and observations regarding LED applications in the Commercial and Industrial marketplace. We will review LED pricing trends, key fixture performance criteria, DOE and Energy Star perspective, along with several case studies.

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Lightfair 2009 – LED’s galore

Friday, May 8th, 2009

Between meetings with a few Groom Energy customers and partners, Bob, Fritz and I had the chance to walk the Javits Center/NYC for Lightfair the last few days.  Lightfair is the US’s annual lighting show which hosts loads of lighting designers, architects, vendors, engineers and folks looking for free trinkets – the show alternates between NYC and Las Vegas each May so this year our commute from Boston and Chicago was a little easier.  A couple thoughts and observations…..

The venue:  As you walk into Javits you cannot help but reach for  your sunglasses – and start the mental calculations of the amount of KWH this place is consuming during the three day exhibit hall event!  Everything is lit to the max.

Induction lighting:  Two years ago we were curious to see whether Induction lamps were going to be highlighted by the large manufacturers, especially Philips with their QL lamp – turns out that they weren’t and we found only one or two vendors showing off an induction lamp based fixture.  The same was true last year.  This year we did find a few more vendors, all of whom had their own retrofit variation for a traditional lighting fixture – but since induction lamp volumes are still not coming, the writing is on the wall for these long lasting high priced lamps as alternatives to the traditional HIF lamps because LED’s HAVE ARRIVED!!!!!

LED’s – then:  At Lightfair 2007 LED’s were, as a friend calls them,  still “blinky blinky” – handful’s of vendors were showing off their fun, colored architectural enhancements for electric signage and discoteque walls.   Leading innovators like Color Kinetics were displaying one of their first white light general illumination products – an undercabinet light.  Lightfair 2008 was a coming out party for LED’s, with a bunch more new white light LED only start up vendors and Chinatown (the regular sub section of the exhibit hall with tons of small manufacturers who can make anything quickly and cheaply) showing blinky blinky in volume. No traditional large fixture vendors like Cooper or Acuity had LED’s highlighted in their booths.

LED’s – 2009: Wow, how the world changed in two years.  White light LED applications were everywhere this year – from downlights to 2 x 2 office to wall packs to parking garage to cobra heads – everyone had their own adaptation of a white light LED fixture.  Consolidation has already begun, with Philips having acquired and integrated Color Kinetics since 2007, CREE acquiring LLF in 2008 and more recently Cooper acquiring IMS just a few months ago.  The new products on display are seriously constrained by the price performance challenge – as a consequence, these new fixtures are designed to produce LESS light than the fixtures they would be replacing – manufacturers either do not admit this or they describe their modular designs which will grow into the LED performance curve.

We also had the chance to catch up over breakfast with Mark McClear of CREE and test his observations about the expected price/performance curve over the coming months.  If, as he suggests, next year’s show will have LED based fixtures using 135 lumens/watt with a 10% decrease in price for the same chip, get ready for REAL acceleration of adoption.  These products will be able to produce sufficient light output with a reasonable cost and will show faster return on investment for C&I managers  looking to cut their wattage consumption.

The C&I lighting fixture world has clearly been divided into two types of players – believers, who are hiring, building, learning with the first designs for these “computer” lights based on integrating LED’s, extruded metal heat sinks, complex optics and solid state power supplies and non-believers, who are betting that their businesses, which relies on creative metal shapes wrapped around standard lamps and ballasts from Sylvania, Philips and GE will survive the new entrant LED challenge.

We’ll be capturing more of these thoughts in our upcoming LED webinar on May 21st as well…

https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=145608&sessionid=1&key=F724C277D9121A1833DD319948698A38&sourcepage=register

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