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Cree Brings LED Lighting to Home Depot
SSLDesign News Staff
August 19, 2010...The Home Depot customers can now purchase an LED luminaire with LED technology from USA-based LED product company, Cree. In a development anticipated in the industry for some time, Cree will make its six-inch LED-downlights available at the home improvement superstore, Home Depot. While numerous other companies have begun offering LED-based bulbs at retailers, this may be the first time that an LED-based downlight is offered to general consumers at a popular retail chain.
Cree's EcoSmart LED Downlight retails for less than $50. The EcoSmart LED Downlight is available now via homedepot.com. Home Depot hopes to make the LED downlights available in nearly 2,000 The Home Depot retail stores in fall 2010.
Cree notes that its EcoSmart LED Downlight was designed to exceed stringent Energy Star criteria. It consumes just 10.5 watts, which is approximately 85-percent less energy than a comparable incandescent and 50-percent less energy than a fluorescent.
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Cleveland City Council Open to Bids for LED Street Light Project and Manufacturing Plant in City
August 19, 2010...LED-based street lights are being adopted by municipal governments around the world as an economical alternative for lighting city streets.
The city of Cleveland, Ohio is uniquely offering an exclusive 10-year contract to supply LED-based street and traffic lights in return for opening a local manufacturing plant that employs city residents.
The city's mayor, Frank Jackson, previously attempted to make a deal with a China-based company for the exclusive contract in exchange for opening a manufacturing plant. However, the city council required that there be a competitive bidding process for the contract.
The person who served as the go-between with the Chinese company was apparently part owner of the Chinese company's North American operations.
On Wednesday, the city council approved the contract and opened the contract up for competitive bids.
The vote was reportedly 12-7. Opponents of the project contract were reportedly fearful that the contract locked the city into a deal that would be too long amid the rapidly evolving LED technology, according to Cleveland's news radio website, WTAM.com.
Mayor Jackson indicated in the article that he hoped the Chinese company would still consider working with the city.
Creative Technology Hong Kong and Future Lighting Develop Luxeon-Based LED Downlights for Asia & Europe
SSLDesign News Staff
August 19, 2010...Future Lighting Solutions today announced a completed joint development project with Creative Technology Hong Kong Limited, which produced a new line of solid state downlights. The LED luminaires were manufactured under Creative Technology's Mabushi brand. The luminaires utilize Luxeon Rebel LEDs and were designed with thermal, electrical and optical support from Future's engineering team.
Creative reportedly selected Luxeon Rebel LEDs for their industry-leading reliability and 50,000-hour useful life. Future also aided in driver selection and overall system design, using proprietary tools to accelerate and optimize LED system development including maximizing LED output and lifetime.
Tools used for the project included Future's SSL Designer for defining, calculating and optimizing baseline system requirements and costs; Usable Light Tool (ULT) for analyzing LED performance under specific operating conditions; LED Reliability Tool (LRT) for determining LED lifetime; and QLED for detailed thermal analysis of the LED solution design.
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Lighting Science Group and BHP Energy Provide DC-powered LED Street Lights for Mexican Superhighway
SSLDesign News Staff
August 19, 2010...Lighting Science Group has devised a direct current version of its LED-based Prolific street lights. The lights can reportedly be run by low voltage direct current from alternative energy sources that do not need to be connected to the electrical grid such as solar or wind power.
Lighting Science Group (LSG) also reports that its Prolific DC LED street lights will soon light up Mexico City's newly constructed "Viaducto Bicentenario" elevated superhighway, which runs 23 kilometers from Lomas Verdes to Tepotzotlan. LSG and BHP Energy Mexico are jointly announcing the nearly completed project. BHP Energy Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V. is Lighting Science Group's exclusive representative in Mexico. Gerstl Consultores selected BHP Energy Mexico to provide LED-based street lights to work with Gerstl Consultatores' solar power systems.
BHP Energy extensively tested various LED-based street lights for the project. Then BHP chose Lighting Science Groups' Prolific Series DC LED roadway 100 watt street lights. Gerstl Consulting integrated its own solar power systems with the LSG street lights for the project, and installed them along Viaducto Bicentenario.
LSG boasts that Viaducto Bicentenario, named for Mexico's Bicentennial, which takes place on September 16th, will be a shining example of the most efficient roadway lighting technology in the world.
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Commentary & Perspectives...
LED Lighting Market Has Room for Less Fancy
Tom Griffiths - Publisher
August 12, 2010...In a pair of May editorials (Driving down the costs - Part 1 & Part 2) we talked about some of areas where cost will be driven out of LEDs and solid state lighting solutions. In both, we discussed how we might hit price floors that the industry will settle on and simply add features to, similar to how laptop PCs have stubbornly clung to something around a $500 price point as the floor for something fairly full featured. That doesn't mean everyone will head to the low point with their products. There is going to be plenty of room for varying levels of quality and engineering that will reflect as "commercial" versus "consumer" or "feature rich" versus "base model". There will also be examples of products that are thoughtfully designed to be commercial grade, without having to be particularly pretty, for the job they do. How many of us have marveled at the artfullness of the gymnasium lights?... Fair to say 'none'?.
As an example of cost-optimization, we're seeing some interesting examples play out in the virtual aisles of Home Depot. Back in the May/June time frame, Home Depot added an A19/Edison type incandescent replacement under the EcoSmart brand name (their in-house private label brand), courtesy of Lighting Sciences Group. I haven't seen it show up in my local Home Depot yet, but it does show up online as a "40w equivalent" for $19.97. LSG hasn't commented that I know of, but the industry consensus is that we're looking at the same product as their Definity A19 3000K model that puts out about 430 lumens on about 8 watts (54 lumens/watt). Interestingly, while it's priced for less than $20 at Home Depot, it sells for substantially more inside the commercial lighting channels. It looks like a good placeholder product that LSG would presumably plan to cost engineer, and perhaps "feature down" as time passes, while "featuring up" the commercial versions to justify the higher selling price. One can only guess if LSG is making any money on the EcoSmart version, given that Home Depot needs some margin in order to carry the product. Survey says... well, it doesn't seem to be a hard guess. Keep in mind, cell phones are all sold well below cost in order to make it up in service, so as long as your plan includes making money "with the business model" it can all work out.
In another move at Home Depot, Cree has apparently cut a deal to add the giant as a retail channel for their CR6 downlight. The CR6 was announced a bit ago as a cost-optimized approach to compliment their popular LR6 which was the original "good enough for prime time" commercial market entry product acquired as part of the LLF deal. There hasn't been an official announcement yet, but Cree President, Chuck Swoboda, let it be known in their recent earnings conference call that the CR6 would be stocked under the EcoSmart brand, and selling for less than $50. As Chuck said, Cree's goal is to, "...challenge people's addiction to inefficient lighting," and this looks like a good way to move that agenda forward. The product has shown up on Home Depot's website, and according to the statement on the call, it should be in the stores this fall.
Since their conference call, Cree's stock price has been punished for forecasting $270M - $280M in revenues next quarter, when the analysts were averaging a guess of $284M. How dare they... They did turn in a 48 cents a share net (up 400%+ from a year earlier), which came in short of analysts expectations, and they aren't getting much credit for 56 to 59 cents a share forecast beating the 54 analysts say they expected. The stock market is a fickle mistress, no doubt, and one suspects the analysts either didn't hear, or didn't much care about the Home Depot deal. Of course, this is all reported by folks that can miss on their interpretations of "the why" in probably the same way they might make a small goof on "the who" (cached version of "supercomputer maker Cree..."). Oops, that would be C-R-A-Y. Personally, I think it's a jittery market that is looking for excuses to to explain bits of irrationality, or "guilt by association" when it shows up. Cree, LSG, and Nexxus are the only publicly traded LED/SSL fairly pure-plays, so you're never sure what "the street" really thinks they are, and what success is going to look like.
On the other track, regarding "engineered but not fancy", we had a chance to visit a rare local-to-Austin SSL manufacturer named Ringdale. It was an interesting visit, with their facility located in the not-fancy area of nearby Georgetown, right next to the airport, in an unassuming building that is being remodeled with their own solid state lighting and controls. It was difficult to pin down exactly what Ringdale's expertise was ahead of time, as LED lighting is a new avenue for the 30+ year old company. We had the pleasure of spending some dedicated time with Klaus Bollmann, who is CEO and head visionary for the company. Klaus has been "extracting light" from things for a similar 30+ years, going back to days at the epitaxial level with semiconductor lasers. What we saw was some non-glitzy common sense engineering that appears to be backed up by results. A big part of their ActiveLED product line is built around a custom implementation of Nichia die and phosphor that they have packaged (not by Nichia) into a neat 4x9 array that is mounted to their secondary heat sinks with clips that allow the metals to expand and contract without stress as you would find in other bonding approaches (they have the IP on that trick). They have also designed their extrusions that reflect and direct the light to take advantage of the natural imperfections that come any time you have light passing through materials, whether it be lenses or simply air. By harnessing imperfection, they are able to get the light where they want, without having to take "exotic" or "perfect" approaches to get it to do that.
They've also taken a general approach of not eeking out every bit of performance into the smallest package, and lo and behold, the "relaxed" system isn't pressing the envelope of anything. Big, nearly mil-grade capacitors were selected for their highbay's power supply so that getting to rated life wasn't going to need to be a 'hopefully' proposition. How long do lightly-taxed power LEDs run when you keep the junction temps at a sane level? The answer is 'a long time' (ask again after the ActiveLED luminaires been running for 10 years and we'll probably have an even better estimate of how much longer they'll go for). Ringdale also developed their own controls, taking advantage of lessons they learned from years in the printer protocol and networking environments. The wall control is intuitive and simple, with high and low settings, as well as motion sensor timeouts all easy to program, at a price that appears easy to swallow. The control itself typically connects to the fixture nearest the switch (which is usually battery backed-up with nearly a week of runtime), and then the rest of the fixtures wirelessly sync levels with whatever the master has been set to. The controls and back-up side has set them up to take advantage of solar systems, including incorporating an approach that slightly dims the lights as the battery state slowly declines. That results in radically extending the useful amount of light without taking the batteries to the levels than can impact their lifetime.
They've got some artsy products as well, including a nice shiny walkway bollard, but even that uses the same simple building blocks, without having to get fancy. There's always room to bring common sense to the party.
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Don't miss the SSL Summit Series, kicking off September 14-15 in New York City, conveniently in Manhattan. It's all about quality, so if you are a luminaire manufacturer that would like to connect with some of the top lighting decision makers in the area, you won't find a more efficient two days during this year. Any luminaire manufacturer receiving product visibility is being vetted for basic quality criteria, but if your company doesn't quite have those LM-79 reports and datasheets all matched up yet, fear not. You're absolutely welcome to attend for the top-level networking and "how to get it done" discussions that can make it even more critical that you find your way there. Visit www.SSLsummit.com for series details, or jump directly the NY overview here.
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