| Features:
Editorial: EPA Plays Politics with Solid State Lighting, Repeats CFL Mistakes
... It was unconscionable. On June 2, 2008, a date that will live in infamy, the solid state lighting community was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the combined communication and policy forces of the Office of Air and Radiation the US Environmental Protection Agency... It will be recorded that the...
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Summit
2008:
What we learned
The feedback is in, and the consensus was: Just
what we needed, do it again soon. In case you missed the Solid
State Lighting Design Summit 2008 in Weehawken, New Jersey, be sure to take
a look at the final
agenda for what went down in the first-of-its-kind event. The Summit brought
together industry thought leaders, pioneers, leading designers, lighting decision-makers
and innovators from the across the solid state lighting eco-system. Read
the conference report...
Solid State Lighting Design
is here to serve the information needs of lighting designers, specifiers, and
decision makers, along with luminaire designers, lighting system integrators
and lighting subsystem developers with application, product and market news
updates for this rapidly evolving technology. Our readership also includes LED
packagers, technology enablers and service companies seeking the the answers
to how best to meet their customers' needs.
Solid
state lighting promises to create unprecedented changes in what we can do with
light. Simultaneously, it will deliver on a promise of massive global energy savings
and access to useful nighttime lighting that has not been conveniently available
to nearly 2 billion people around the world. We're glad to have you join us in
the revolution!
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Strategies Unlimited Predicts Continued Strong Growth in HB LEDs for Lighting
LIGHTimes StaffJune 12, 2008...Strategies Unlimited (SU), the premiere market analysis firm covering the LED industry, has begun accepting orders for its annual high brightness LED market review and forecast. Strategies Unlimited reports that the market for HB LEDs used for lighting applications is one of the fastest growing segments of the HB LED market. The company revealed that the market for HB LED lighting used in lighting applications has grown at a rate of 60 percent per year since 2006. According to SU, the report will provide an LED industry overview, and a listing of the companies involved in the HB LED industry. SU says its report will include market data and forecasts through 2012 broken out by material type, color, and package type.
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Barco Acquires High End Systems
SSLDesign News StaffJune 12, 2008...Barco of Brussels, Belgium, a provider of lighting and visualization products for select markets has acquired High End Systems based in Austin, Texas USA. High End Systems supplies automated luminaires, digital lighting, and lighting controls. High End Systems reportedly employs 156 people and is a profitable company with USD $44 million sales in 2007. Barco says that with the merging of two strong industry players, the acquisition reinforces its leadership position in the fast converging video and lighting segments. The total value of the transaction is USD $55 million.
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June 12, 2008...Thorntons, a gas station and convenience store chain based in Kentucky, has reportedly chosen LED lighting from BetaLED. LED luminaires from the Wisconsin-based company will serve as exterior lights for some 13 Thorntons gas station/convenience stores. Addtionally Thorntons says that all future renovations and construction will feature LED luminaires from the company. Thortons recently opened a gas station/convenience store location in Edgewood, Kentucky, which BetaLED says is the first LED Lit store in the state.
BetaLED says that Gas stations provide a perfect opportunity for using LED technology. According to BetaLED, gas station owners and operators are realizing that customers are drawn to their properties because of perceptions of cleanliness, safety, and a friendly atmosphere, and BetaLED contends that these traits of a gas station can be enhanced with LEDs.
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DOE Releases L Prize Requirements
SSLDesign News StaffJune 10, 2008...At Lightfair International 2008 in Las Vegas, the Department of Energy officially released the requirements for the Bright for Tomorrow Lighting Competition, also known as the L Prize. An award is given to the developer of the best solid state lighting replacement for the 60-Watt A-19, Edison base bulb, the most common bulb used. Another prize will be given to the best solid state lighting replacement for PAR 38 halogen incandescent lamps. The maker of the solid state lighting-based 60-watt incandescent replacement will receive $10 million. The maker of the solid state lighting-based PAR 38 halogen incandescent replacement will receive $5 million.
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Lamina Opens New York Product Showroom and Design Center
SSLDesign News StaffJune 5, 2008...Lamina Lighting has opened the Lamina Design Center, a product showroom and design studio at 336 West 37th Street in Manhattan. The Center is located in the Arts Building (www.theartsbuilding.com). The building is also home to lighting designers, artists and other businesses in the creative field.
The company said it plans to soon hold a series of networking events and hands-on workshops at The Center. Dan Polito, Vice President of Marketing for Lamina explained that the workshop curriculum will focus primarily on optical, thermal and electronic issues associated with advancing solid state lighting technology and luminaire design. Future networking events will be held in The Center’s fifth floor studio and rooftop garden.
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UCSB Professor Shuji Nakamura to Receive Prince of Asturias Award
LIGHTimes StaffJune 5, 2008...Professor Shuji Nakamura, Director UC Santa Barbara’s Solid-State Lighting and Energy Center, has again received accolades for his innovations related to the gallium nitride growth for blue LEDs and laser diodes while working at Nichia. Nakamura has been named a recipient of the 2008 Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research. Each award recipient is reportedly presented with a medal and a Joan Miro sculpture commissioned specifically for the awards. The recipients in each category also share a €50,000 (US$77,000) stipend.
The prize from the Prince of Asturias Foundation in the Technical and Scientific Research category is given annually to “the individual, work group or institution whose discoveries or research represent a significant contribution to the progress of humanity in the fields of Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Medicine, Earth and Space Sciences, as well as their related technical aspects and technologies”.
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Lamina Introduces Line of Bright White LEDs
SSLDesign News StaffJune 5, 2008...Lamina Lighting of Westampton, New Jersey USA announced that it has launched a new line of high lumen output white LED products. The company says that the line, which includes the Lamina TitanTurbo TruColor White LED, delivers light output of up to 2000 lumens. In addition, the company notes that it offers a unique “TruColor” feature that maintains the natural colors of an illuminated object. The special optics give the packaged LED the ability to focus light into a tight 60-degree cone angle. Lamina says that in combination with Lamina’s already unmatched thermal performance and compact footprint – make these light engines ideal for designers striving for high lumen output, accurate color rendering and focused light concentration.
Lamina says that the TitanTurbo “TruColor” white LED combines a range of new features in a package that is the same size as Lamina’s standard Titan LED. It reportedly delivers 55 lumens per watt at 1300 lumens of output, and can also reach the 2000 lumen output level while providing 45 lumens per watt. It has the same 1-inch-square footprint as the original Lamina TitanTurbo, and it can use all secondary optics that original TitanTurbo can use.
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Martin Kubanka Designs Lighting for Miss Universe Slovakia 2008
SSLDesign News StaffJune 5, 2008...Martin Kubanka designed the lighting for the 2008 final of the Miss Universe Slovak Republic. The event was staged at the National Tennis Centre in Bratislava. Kubanka used over 100 Robe moving lights at the core of his lighting design for event. The rig was supplied by leading Slovakian rental company Q-99. It included 24 Robe ColorMix 575 AT fixtures and 26 Robe LEDWash 136 LT and LEDWash 196 LT blinders. Kubanka’s goal was to provide a glamorous show which was supposed to be extra special for the 10th anniversary of the Slovakian Miss Universe event. He wanted it to look equally as good on camera as it did for the live audience. It was broadcast live on STV 1, Slovakia’s primary TV channel.
The moving lights were hung off a series of trusses in the roof and also spread out across the floor and around the set, which was designed by Michael Kland. Kubanka says he has used Robe moving lights on most of his recent work, and they are his first choice of fixture for their power and reliability.
Kubanka positioned 40 Robe ColorSpot 1200E ATs, 12 ColorWash 1200E ATs and 34 ColorSpot 575E ATs, along with 10 LEDWash 196 LT blinders, 8-lite blinders and Source Four PARs in the air on approximately 180 meters of trussing installed for the show. Floor lighting for the event included 8 of Robe’s ColorSpot and 8 of the ColorWash 1200E ATs and 24 ColorMix 575 ATs along with 16 LEDWash 136 LT. The floor was under-lit with LED lighting, and the front of the set also featured integral LED walls. The scenic columns on the side of the stage were lit-up with the 24 Robe ColorMix 575 ATs.
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Philips' Ihor Lys Named 2008 USA National Inventor of the Year for SSL Breakthrough
LIGHTimes StaffJune 3, 2008...Philips Solid-State Lighting Solutions of Burlington, Massachusetts USA, announced that its chief scientist, and Color Kinetics co-founder, Dr. Ihor Lys has been named 2008 National Inventor of the Year. The Intellectual Property Owners (IPO) Education Foundation selected Dr. Lys for the award for his invention of Powercore technology that integrates power management and data management within a fixture.
The company says that the patented Powercore technology increases electrical efficiency and lowers production costs.
The company points out that Powercore eliminates the need for external low-voltage power supplies and special cabling that were historically required to operate solid-state lighting systems. For this reason, the company contends that Powercore reduces installation cost and complexity while making these fixtures far easier to use in existing lighting environments. According to the company, the realm of solid state lighting requires that LEDs must be integrated into precisely integrated systems that can be adapted to existing infrastructure. Power management is a critical component of a well designed LED-based lighting system, the company indicated.
Dr. Lys co-founded Color Kinetics in 1997, which was later acquired by Philips. During his ten-years with Color Kinetics, prior to its acquisition, Dr. Lys led the development of the company's breakthrough Chromacore and Chromasic technologies. Chromacore and Chromasic technologies control color mixing with LED light systems to produce any color of light and color temperature of light. Philips Solid State Lighting Solutions says these technologies continue to support and differentiate Philips' solid-state lighting systems today. The company notes that Dr. Lys has been a prolific inventor, having contributed to more than 50 issued patents and numerous patent filings.
The National Inventor of the Year Award, one of the top honors bestowed to U.S. inventors, will be presented in a ceremony on June 10, 2008 in Washington , D.C.
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ActOne LED Lighting Provides Inviting Atmosphere for Starlight CasinoMay 29, 2008...The Starlight Casino in New Westminster near Vancouver, Canada, has an alluring atmosphere created by ActOne’s LED lighting tubes. The lighting effect is reportedly generated from the dispersion of color lights from 200 LED lighting tubes. The LED lighting tubes, which are over draped mesh-screen curtains, have a total length of 700 feet The Starlight Casino located in the Greater Vancouver area is a brand new $110-million, 100,000 square foot gaming and entertainment facility that was completed last December. It has 850 slot machines and 45 gaming tables plus restaurants and bars. The casino draws as many as 15,000 customers a day. The interior designer worked with ActOne to provide a theme with a warm and inviting atmosphere for the casino’s customers.
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Commentary
& Perspectives...
EPA Plays Politics with Solid State Lighting, Repeats CFL Mistakes
Tom Griffiths - PublisherJune 12, 2008...It
was unconscionable. On June 2, 2008, a date that will live in infamy, the solid
state lighting community was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the combined
communication and policy forces of the Office of Air and Radiation the US Environmental
Protection Agency... It will be recorded that the distance from a government-inspired
concept to an actual policy makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately
planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the EPA has deliberately
sought to deceive the solid state lighting community by their cooperative approach
and expressions of hope for continued peace. (Ref FDR Pearl
Harbor speech for relevant inspiration.) So what form did this sneak
attack take? In a June
2 letter to lighting "manufacturers and other interested parties"
the EPA announced a "technical amendment", version 4.2, to the Energy
Star residential light fixture (RLF), ceiling fan and vent fan specifications
that is of immediate effect in allowing LED light fixtures to achieve the Energy
Star mark. It does that by allowing qualification to "new testing procedures"
that are somewhat useful but unproven, unqualified at the fixture level and without
quantitative history to substantiate their predictive reliability. In addition,
the spec itself is directly contrary to the SSL and lighting industry consensus
that agreed that the "dim and harsh" factor was a major consumer turn-off
with regard to CFL technology at its introduction. Unappealing and ineffective
CFL lamps introduced into the residential market caused a general rejection of
that technology and set back the pace of adoption on the order of a decade. The
EPA's answer is apparently to repeat the mistake by allowing residential luminaires
throwing out as little as 0 (zero, zip, nada) lumens to qualify as long as the
light engine inside generates 40 lumens/watt with a CCT that can be as harsh as
6500K (like lighting your house with an arc welder that's malfunctioning). Oh,
and you have to label it with wording such as "This fixture produces light
equivalent to a 6 watt incandescent bulb" in accordance with a handy reference
chart. If your integral light engine produces 40 to 69 lumens, you simply need
to label it as "equivalent to a 6 watt incandescent bulb". For reference,
my wife and son use those leftover 40 lumen bulbs in their tabletop snow village
display each Christmas because they're too dim for use as decent nightlights!
The EPA figures that qualifying the LED light engine (to whatever minimal standard)
inside the fixture is sufficient. So, you can grab your Energy Star mark, push
a grand 10 lumens out of a crummy LED "reading light" and claim it is
as bright a 40-watt bulb because your "LED light engine" inside the
fixture produces between 450 and 799 lumens that are going who knows where. That will
get them flocking to the stores to buy one for every room in the house! (Relevant
4 pages of the RLF spec here,
or full spec here,
with SSL amendment starting on page 35 of the actual doc which is page 45 of the
PDF. Note that we have to invest our bandwidth in providing it to you as the EPA
hasn't yet posted it anywhere... still trying to keep anyone from noticing?). So
is the EPA unaware that consumers eventually buy these products? Heck no. They
are confident that consumers are so varied (or ignorant?) with their opinions
that they can simply try it and decide if they like it or not, as is made clear
by their notation at the end of the spec: "Note: EPA seeks to ensure that
qualified fixtures meet consumer expectations for light output. Consumer preference
for light output varies widely, and the same is true for fixture design intent.
Therefore it is impractical to prescribe lumen values for various residential
lighting fixture applications. This consumer awareness requirement is intended
to help consumers understand the limitations of LED light engines producing less
than 800 lumens (equivalent to 60 watts incandescent)." No reason to
accept the lighting industry and market consensus that consumers may actually
have an interest in the amount of light that actually comes out of the fixture,
and certainly, what does the lighting industry know about an acceptable level
of brightness for different types of residential fixtures? And there doesn't seem
to be any reason to recognize the directional nature of LED lighting, or that
it is inherently different from any of the predecessor illumination sources. They
are probably great people over there at the EPA, but somebody has made some very
bad decisions. Given that IESNA has just completed LM-79 “IESNA Approved
Method for the Electrical and Photometric Measurements of Solid-State Lighting
Products” and that the Department of Energy (DOE, you know, the ones actually
charged with responsibility for generating and implementing energy policy and
regulation in the USA) has taken their legislatively mandated SSL responsibilities
and developed and honed the qualification testing procedures over the last several
years with 5 rounds of the CALiPER testing, it seems perfectly reasonable for
the EPA to simply assign their own way of testing these. At least they did notice
that the Illumination Engineering Society (note key words, all of which imply,
what's that word... oh, "expertise" maybe) was working on something.
A footnote on page 35 of the document reads, "IESNA LM-79... may in the future
incorporate LED light engine test procedures; as such EPA may reference LM-79
in future revisions of this specification." Those pesky illumination engineers,
they left out the part about LED light engines when describing how to characterize
a luminaire. Why would they do that? Maybe because it's useless to characterize
"the LED bulb" and then use it to describe the characteristics of the
finished system. My computer has a 1.4 GHz Pentium, isn't that specific enough
to know whether it will work as the fly-by-wire system on an airliner? Oh, well
it only has 64K of RAM, a floppy disk, a weak power supply and no operating system,
but what difference would the system performance make in that application while
I fly over your town? So here are the interesting questions: With the DOE-
and SSL-community driven Energy Star criteria completed back on Sept. 12, 2007,
and set with an effectivity date of Sept. 30, 2008, why would EPA make this pre-emptive
move now? Why would they do it in secret without any public comment or constituent
input? Why wouldn't they even reveal to anyone they were working on this, much
less work in coordination with either the broader industry or the DOE (who received
the mandate to oversee the SSL program back in 2005, under Section 912 of the
2005 Energy Independence and Security Act)? Why would they make this "technical
revision" of "immediate effect"? Are they just enthusiastic (albeit
a bit naive)? I wanted to ask those questions of the EPA program manager, but
my two messages yesterday and the day before using the words "I'm under a
tight deadline" have remained unanswered so far. In fairness, he may simply
be on vacation or out of touch for a few days, and if we get those answers later,
we'll let everyone know. Meanwhile, we get to form our own opinion, as you should
also form your own. Our Theory: The EPA has no significant reason to be
involved with the Energy Star program at all, they know it, they lost any mandate
for involvement with SSL and this is a desperate "land grab" to try
and retain a stake in something they have no business in. Frankly, justifying
EPA co-control of Energy Star on the basis that lower energy consumption reduces
energy-production related pollution is analogous to the Treasury Department claiming
a stake in Energy Star because an emphasis on energy efficient products can have
an effect on the distribution of tax revenues in various manufacturing sectors.
Their claim to co-control is more historical, since the EPA generated the Energy
Star moniker in the mid-1990s to apply to computers that had a sleep mode capability.
The DOE had created an "Energy Saver" label with a full range of products,
but clearly someone in the EPA had some pull at the time and while the DOE and
EPA programs were merged, the Energy Star label won out and the EPA kept its stake
(read "money") in the energy efficiency programs. Once again, we prove
that when something is given to, or taken by, a government agency, they are generally
loathe to give it up later on. Our suggestions: A) If you are a luminaire
manufacturer, ignore the technical addendum to the RLF Energy Star spec; B) If
you are a specifier, don't depend on our opinion. Contact the EPA yourself and
have them explain to you how the technical addendum to section 4.2 of the RLF
will assure you of high quality luminaires that meet customer expectations, and
how it will aid adoption of SSL technology rather than harm it (US tax dollars
are paying their salaries, so they work for you... they are civil servants
not civil supervisors); C) If the audience at large becomes aware
of an LED-based luminaire or fixture provider that applies the Energy Star mark
based on qualification under RLF Version 4.2, forward them to us here at Solid
State Lighting Design and we'll post a list of those manufacturers on a special
page dedicated to, "Products that may have been qualified to a less rigid
Energy Star specification that could compromise the consumer perception of, and
satisfaction with the LED-based lighting product that results... We recommend
that you contact the manufacturer for luminaire-level test result data before
making any purchase decision regarding this product. D) Pass the "permalink"
to this editorial along to anyone and everyone that you think
might have an stake in the success of solid state lighting (for permalink, right click here and choose 'copy shortcut' or 'copy link location' and then paste into any document or email). Let's get some
buzz going before this nonsense gets out of hand and inferior products hurt us
all.
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