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Lighting
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Arnhem to Switch 2300 Street Lights to Philips LED Luminaires
SolidStateLightingDesign News Staff
October 4, 2012...The Municipality of Arnhem of the Netherlands is to install Philips LED lighting on a large scale, in to make the city more sustainable. According to Philips, 2,300 street lights on the city's major roads are to be fitted with dimmable LED lamps. This is expected to achieve energy savings of some 47%, equivalent to 500,000 kWh a year. Philips points out that the investment will be recouped through the reduced costs of energy consumption, maintenance and lamp replacement. The project will take four years and was recently started in Arnhem South around Groningensingel.
The municipality is committed to sustainable LED innovations with a higher light quality for the people of Arnhem. Responsible Municipal Executive councilor Margreet Van Gastel said, “Arnhem is staking a great deal on energy savings. With the ‘Energy Made in [Arnhem]’ program we are now working with more than 80 organizations to achieve a sustainable future for our city. By fitting our street lighting with LED lamps, Arnhem aims to become the shining example as regards energy savings in public spaces.”
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China LED Market Suffering Growing Pains
October 4, 2012...In 2012, numerous government projects and subsidies have spawned a booming LED market with the LED firms. Much of the LED market is centered around the LED makers headquartered around Shenzhen in the Guangdong province. While subsidies have been plentiful, they have reportedly been given to all LED firms regardless of the quality of their products, according to a
Digitimes article. For this reason low quality products can still compete in the market with low prices.
Additionally, many of the small small LED firms are not well structured financially. This has prompted some China LED industry observers to predict that by 2015, around 30% of the firms will be acquired by peers or exit the market.
In 2012, around 80 LED firms in Shenzhen have declared bankruptcy. One notable example is LED display maker Shenzhen YJG Optoelectronics which claimed revenues exceeding CNY100 million before declaring bankruptcy.
Market researchers have have concluded that the market for LED billboards is saturated after six years of compound annual growth of 28.5 percent from 2001 to 2007, and an additional growth spurt in 2010 due to the World Expo in Shanghai. The high growth rate attracted many players.
The saturated LED billboard market has pushed firms such as Absen Optoelectronics to switch focus to LED lighting products. Absen announced a plan to provide integrated OEM/ODM services for LED lighting in 2012. The firm plans to increase LED lighting revenues to 50% of total revenues in three years. Absen has been focusing on the domestic enterprise lighting market. Absen believes low gross margin has become the norm in the LED lighting market. This is the reason why most LED firms favor the corporate lighting market that has certain set requirements for LED products.
Uniquely, China-based Neo-Neon has been expanding its customer base through ODM/OEM business. The firm enables customers that have the intention of entering the LED lighting market to begin production immediately by providing a complete production process. Neo-Neon also provides free technology transfer and training that can help customers begin production within one week, according to the firm.
The business model has reportedly been helping the firms to expand to markets such as Poland and Turkey. Neo-Neon not only provides LED lighting module, the firm also sent technicians to help customers with production.
China-based Sanan Optoelectronics is a fast-growing LED chipmaker that entered Taiwan to compete with its main local rival Epistar. Sanan Optoelectronics currently has 144 units of 2-inch MOCVD equipment with capacity utilization rate approaching 90 percent and has a monthly capacity of around 100,000 AlGaInP LED expitaxial wafers and 300,000-400,000 units for blue LEDs. Sanan has become a supplier for Taiwan-based LED packaging firms such as Unity Opto and BrightLED. Sanan has been expanding capacity and expects that by 2013, annual capacity of LED epitaxial wafers will reach 10 million units and LED chips will reach 30 million units. In mid-August, Sanan announced that the company has obtained subsidies of CNY12.15 million for sapphire substrates from Anxi County. The construction of the plant is near completion and equipment will be installed with production scheduled to begin in 2013.
The Grand Victoria Casiono in Elgin Ilinois Employs LED Lighting from LEDnovation for Retrofit Project
SolidStateLightingDesign News Staff
October 3, 2012...The Grand Victoria Casino, like many other businesses has initiated a Green sustainability program. As part of the program, the company chose Lednovation products after trying out numerous LED products from leading companies. Major factors in the evaluation included: improved lighting, energy savings, utility rebates, warranty, dimming, quality, color rendering and compatibility with CCTV and video surveillance systems. Additional factors considered were domestic design and manufacture and security review from the Illinois Gaming Board.
The 29,000 sq foot facility with 1150 gaming machines and 29 gaming tables, started the “Excite the Senses” promotion that required a lighting system that met or exceeded the existing lighting standards.
The project was installed and completed in time to qualify for Com Ed’s 2012 rebate program which provided an incentive check in excess of $14,000. LEDnovation was selected primarily due to lamp efficiency, aesthetics, lumens, and superior color. A combination of PARs, MR16s and A19’s were installed totaling several thousand lamps saving over 66,000 watts.
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Ronald McDonald House Gets Cree LED Lighting
SolidStateLightingDesign News Staff
October 2, 2012...The newly renovated Ronald McDonald House of Durham, North Carolina (RMHD) is opening its doors to even more families. The house now features nearly 150 LED luminaires from Cree, Inc. The addition of Cree LED lighting supports the RMHD mission of providing a comfortable, warm, home-like atmosphere for critically ill children and their families, while also saving energy and money.
RMHD says that the newly installed Cree® LED lighting, including CR Series LED troffers and CR Series LED downlights, provides energy and maintenance savings estimated at nearly 65 percent over the previously planned fluorescent lighting solution.
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Commentary & Perspectives...
Happy Birthday(s) LEDs!... But what does it mean?
Tom Griffiths - Publisher
October 9, 2012...October 9, 2012 marked the 50th birthday of the visible LED, accomplished by Dr. Nick Holonyak, Jr. at General Electric. Dr. Holonyak's invention was a the first practical visible semiconductor-alloy laser, accomplished with a blend gallium-arsenide-phosphate (GaAsP... quite an appropriate acronym), in parallel with Jim Hall's efforts with GaAs that resulted in the infrared semiconductor laser. Holonyak had a simple goal relative to Hall's laser effort... Nick wanted to see what was going on. (GE put out a quick write up, including an interview with Dr. Holonyak here). Of course, red alone wasn't going to cut it, and notably, on July 7, 1972, Herb Maruska the first blue/violet LED emitting at 430nm, and bright enough to be seen in a well-lit room. So happy belated 40th to the blue LED as well. Herb had written an interesting and comprehensive 7-page history of the blue LED that we published some years back, and which is still available here.
Birthdays are cool things, mostly because they are about you, and we all lean towards finding enjoyment in stuff that's about us. People give you presents, bake you a cake, throw you a party, send cards (or email them) and general tell you "Happy Birthday". Come to think of it, that last part is probably the biggest deal, as how often on a normal day does anyone encourage you to be happy? Once you get so several people doing that, it moves from uncommon to impressively unique. And we do wish people a happy birthday because a birthday represents a certain accomplishment - credit to dad for the easy work, mom for the hard part, and once you were walking, credit to you for having avoided too many stupid things that particular year to allow you to be around for the next. It's also an opportunity to reflect on your accomplishments and fulfillment of your purpose so far, if you've figured out you have one (which you do), and to project forward to the elements of your purpose that are yet waiting to be uncovered. We continue to celebrate birthdays of folks that have passed on when their accomplishments have had a well-recognized lasting impact on the world... hopefully with intention to do our small part to extend that impact into the future.
So the birthdays here aren't about whether a piece of semiconductor-alloy has a happy day or not, but are rather more about the purpose side of things; about what we're going to do with those accomplishments to extend them into the future. So what will the extension of those accomplishments mean? Interestingly enough, I don't think we know a big part of that answer yet.
I mean, we've all got the part about higher-quality, longer-lasting, more human-responsive light figured out; at least in terms of the what, although folks are poking in a lot of different directions about the specific 'how' kinds of options. But there is more to these LED things than just better light to replace the light that's already there. It just strikes me there's a bigger purpose in all this, much as there was a bigger purpose in the combination of the PC, mobile and optical communications revolutions (computing plus bandwidth, made mobile, has resulted in an entire restructuring of how societies, and the world, interact... and we haven't yet gotten to the point that everyone even has the technology).
So what can we imagine? I'll float two ideas for discussion. First, we're going to collectively think less about our lighting than we have before, simply because it will have become more ubiqutous and less intrusive. Ultimately, we don't really want to have light, we want to see what we want to see. Now we think about the kitchen light because we have to turn it on, with an additional example that in California with the new Title 24 specs for new construction, you have to turn it on and separately turn it up if you all the light that is available. We typically don't place all our lighting on motion sensors, since we're typically not into having the lights come blazing on for a space we're simply passing through. In the extreme, we really-really don't want the lights blazing on when we're asleep and the dog moves from the foot of the bed out the couch. But what if the lights could be "taught" what we want to have happen. If I stumble out of the bedroom after having been asleep for a while, in order to refill the water, or stick a Post-It on the counter to remind me of something my sleeping mind told me I was in danger of forgetting, I would likely appreciate a bit of gentle "navigation lighting", and I most certainly wouldn't object if it came up from dark to not in an almost imperceptible way. Once it happens that way, I won't really be thinking very much about the light, or lack of it, as I have to now. I'll just be able to see what I want to see. It seems simple enough to extend that line of thought to all the light in our lives. Follow us around our nightly, and daily, worlds with amount and type of light that helps us function efficiently and undistractedly, and pretty quickly, we'll forget about the light.
As a second idea for an interesting purpose, how about "mind control"? I don't see much reason not to believe that our fairly recent 'discoveries' of the relationship between the amount, timing and type of lighting available to us is just the tip of the knowledge iceberg. Shine the wrong kind of light at office workers, or school children, and they get sleepy, or irritated or distracted. If you feed us lots of nice, blue-spectrum heavy light in the evening, and you set us up for a non-restful night's sleep. Shine the right frequency of light at tissue, and it heals faster. Flicker the light "in the wrong way" and you can trigger a seizure in someone sensitive to that. And that's just some of the stuff we know. Much like the invention of the microscope let us "see" what was going on with the interaction of elements in our blood, now that solid state lighting has given us unprecendented ability to control the frequency and type of light created, we've literally opened a whole new door to understanding the interaction with light and the human mind and physiology.
This should be interesting.
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