The Lighting Controls Association has announced that EE205: Personal Lighting Control has been added to the Association’s popular online Education Express distance education courses. Residing at the Association’s website, Education Express provides in-depth education about lighting controls and controllable ballast technology, application, system design and commissioning, as well as meta-issues such as LEED, energy codes [...]

Acuity Brands Lighting, Inc. has entered into an agreement (subject to regulatory approval) to acquire 100% of the outstanding capital stock of Sensor Switch, Inc., the $37 million controls manufacturer, for $205 million. Sensor Switch, based in Wallingford, CT, offers energy-saving control solutions such including occupancy sensors, photocontrols and distributed lighting control devices. “The acquisition [...]

I hope you’ll excuse some blatant self promotion, but I received some good news about one of my books, The Lighting Controls Handbook. The book has been selected by NCQLP as a primary reference for its Lighting Certified (LC) certification exam. Here’s a description of the book from the publisher: “Intended for energy managers, electrical [...]

The Lighting Controls Association authorized ZING Communications, Inc. to conduct a survey of a group of nearly 900 lighting designers, more than 730 electrical engineers and more than 530 lighting/energy consultants subscribing to the LightNOW lighting industry and lightingCONTROL lighting control e-newsletters. The survey, conducted online based on three email invitations distributed in December 2008 [...]

Great conversation still happening in the comments section in an earlier post here. To which I’d like to add: Perhaps we are “banning” the wrong technology? CFLs save energy but they have dimming issues with self-ballasted screw-in type units, thermal issues in some luminaires, sizing issues in others, color, time to reach full brightness, etc. [...]

In many schools, lighting eats up 30-40% of utility costs. As energy codes become more restrictive, can lighting satisfy the demands of the modern classroom, with horizontal and vertical workplanes, computers and A/V equipment? To test one approach, the California Energy Commission (CEC) and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) engaged [...]

The Continental Automated Buildings Association (CABA) has released a report on “bright green buildings,” which CABA defines as a “building that leverages intelligent technologies to support environmental sustainability while providing a significant return on investment (ROI).” The report, titled Bright Green Buildings: Convergence of Green and Intelligent Buildings and authored by Frost & Sullivan, features [...]

Multilevel switching and personal dimming are often lumped together because the goal is the same–providing users a manual choice of light levels. The 2003 Advanced Lighting Guidelines, published by the New Buildings Institute, says they both save about 30% in energy. There is evidence that bi-level switching saves much more energy than personal dimming control, [...]

Studies show that commercial buildings produce about half of greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change—making these buildings the top emitter of human-caused greenhouse gases, ahead of cars and trucks—while consuming nearly three-fourths of electricity produced at power plants. The Commercial Buildings Initiative (CBI) is a public-private partnership formed to achieve an ambitious goal: By [...]