As LED lighting integrates with building automation systems and provides a platform for Big Data, cyber security may become an important issue. Jerry Plank’s column in the September issue of LD+A discusses the issue.

Interesting reading. Read it here.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Scott Roos, Vice President, Product Design, and Kristin Fedoruk, director, Energy Sales and Solutions, Juno Lighting Group. The topic: LED high-bay lighting. I’m happy to share her responses with you here. The interview informed an article I wrote for the September 2015 issue of tED.

DiLouie: How would you characterize current and future demand for LED high-bay lighting in the new commercial building market? Retrofit market?

Roos: LED high-bays are equally well suited for both new construction and retrofit applications. However, the reality of the current market is that there are simply many more retrofit project opportunities available. One-for-one retrofits are driving most of the market and this will likely continue for the foreseeable future.

Fedoruk: Due to the falling price of higher wattage LED luminaires during the past couple of years, the opportunity is now greater for an end user’s return on investment to increase. It becomes a very attractive proposition – especially when figuring the cost of waiting on a traditional sourced high-bay replacement with a LED high-bay. In addition, LED fixtures can be eligible for rebates from utilities and LED fixtures require virtually zero maintenance for many years.

DiLouie: What market share does LED lighting have against HID and fluorescent in the new construction high-bay lighting market?

Roos: In dollars we estimate that LED high-bay lighting will account for over half the sales in this category in 2015. If we measure in units, however, LED high-bay penetration looks to be around 20 percent, but is growing rapidly at more than 25 percent per year. At that rate it won’t be long before LED captures dominant share both in terms of unit and dollar sales.

DiLouie: What advantages does the LED source offer compared to fluorescent and HID for these luminaire types?

Roos: In comparison to metal halide, LED has five times longer life, much higher lumen maintenance and instant start capability, which of course comes into play when using them with controls. 0-10V dimming has become a standard, and on/off or high/low sensors are a popular option. Based on mean lumens, fixture efficacies can be more than double when comparing to older probe start technology or 40 percent higher when comparing to the most efficient generation of electronically ballasted Pulse Start metal halide lamps. These savings can be substantially higher if lighting controls such as occupancy sensors and daylight harvesting are used, which were not practical to apply with most HID systems.

Compared to linear fluorescent, LED high-bays can have up to two-and-a-half times longer life – although to be fair – there are now longer life linear fluorescent lamp options that compare favorably with LED L70 lifetimes. LED luminaire efficacies of over 100 lumens per watt can be 30 percent higher than the typical fluorescent high bay, which translates directly into energy savings. The potential of LED technology to maximize energy savings and return on investment can be best realized on new construction projects that are not locked into fixture spacing based on older technologies. This is because LED high-bays with advanced optical design can more precisely and uniformly distribute fixture lumens, allowing the use of fewer luminaires spaced further apart.

DiLouie: How would you characterize current LED high-bay luminaire offerings in terms of light output, sizes, optics, wattages, CRI, color temperatures, service life, and compatibility with or integration of lighting controls?

Roos: On all of these criteria LED high-bay luminaires have the ability to perform extremely well. How well depends on how a manufacturer thermally and optically designs the luminaire and selects/bins/operates the LEDs. Like any other category of products, when trying to meet the lowest market price levels, some of the performance will be compromised. For example, driving the LEDs especially hard in attempt to reduce the LED count will lower fixture efficacy and shorten the L70 life. And LED high-bays are generally very easy and economical to integrate with lighting control systems; often the standard driver has dimming capability.

DiLouie: What are typical energy savings for a design with HID or fluorescent versus LED high-bay lighting, assuming an equivalent maintained light level?

Roos: The savings are greatest in comparison to outdated Probe Start Metal Halide systems, where a two to three times energy savings can be expected, especially in an application that the fixtures are on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Compared to more efficient Pulse Start Metal Halide lamps, energy savings in the range of 30 to 40 percent are typical. On top of that additional savings can be achieved with the use of controls such as occupancy sensors or daylight harvesting that are generally not practical with HID lamps. As compared to linear fluorescent high bays, a 30 percent energy savings would be typical when converting to a well-performing LED high-bay.

DiLouie: What are the top trends in LED high-bay luminaire design? Please note the differences in how these LED luminaires are designed differently from their HID and fluorescent competitors.

Roos: There are three general types of LED high-bay luminaire designs:

The most efficient are ones that place discrete TIR optics over each LED in a large array to very precisely and efficiently distribute the light. This type of fixture makes the best use of the available lumens and substantially fewer lumens can achieve similar levels of light when compared to traditional technologies. These fixtures are generally higher in cost due to the number of LEDs, optics and wiring harnesses involved in the design. They can also be difficult to justify on one-for-one retrofit projects, as fixed luminaire spacing based on the limitations of legacy technologies do not take full advantage of their extraordinary optical performance.

Next are rectangular fixtures that mimic the general design of linear fluorescent high-bays. These fixtures typically use linear arrays of lower power LEDs that operate at efficacies of 30 percent or higher when compared to linear fluorescent lamps, which is why they outperform them, even though there is nothing exotic about the optical control.

Finally, there are round form factor LED high-bays that are modeled after the classic HID large reflector or refractor designs. Often these fixtures use single or multiple high-wattage chip on board arrays, sometimes in combination with a glass secondary optic. This type of fixture can be expected to outperform its metal halide counterpart primarily because of the high efficacy of the current generation of chip on board arrays that are used, which can now exceed 150 lumens per watt. Another advantage of this form factor is the round design is most resistant to physical damage when fitted with a wire guard, which is why they are often preferred in applications like gymnasiums where they are more vulnerable. In addition, some commercial and retail applications want to preserve an industrial factory aesthetic with either a plain or decorative round high-bay form factor.

DiLouie: What are the top trends in high-bay lighting in general, and how is this affecting high-bay luminaire design?

Fedoruk: Customers followed electrical distributors’ recommendations for the past 15 years on energy savings. They’ve switched from probe start metal halide to pulse start metal halide or linear fluorescent high-bays. Next, the linear fluorescent customers looked at linear LED (either LED lamp replacements or full fixture). There are still a lot of round high-bay traditional metal halide fixtures out there (either probe or pulse start) and those customers never bought in to the look of linear fixtures. Whether it’s due to the distribution or just physical aesthetics – the need for the round LED high-bay is still there.

DiLouie: What are the main attributes of an LED high-bay luminaire that electrical distributors would be looking at when considering an LED over an HID or fluorescent product?

Fedoruk: If the electrical distributors have the opportunity to offer their customer one or the other, there are many considerations – especially what is important to the end user. Is it service life? Efficiency? Lumen output? Color? CRI? Most LED fixtures have a much better CRI than the traditional probe metal halide. Finally, in industrial environments, the need for lenses in case of a non-passive HID lamp failure (or explosion) is an insurance necessity, while with LED there is no lamp that can fail non-passively. Lenses may alter the output of the luminaire as much as 10 percent.

DiLouie: What are disadvantages or potential pitfalls in selecting or using high-bay LED products that distributors should be aware of, and how they should they mitigate them?

Roos: Higher ambient environments can be a challenge, especially on driver temperatures. Of course, higher ambient environments have always been a challenge even with conventional technology fixtures with electronic ballasts. Distributors should make sure to know the ambient temperatures for the application and select a product that has been designed for that type of environment. Also, chemical contamination is a concern with LEDs. For example, in a manufacturing environment where chemicals are being used, it is best to work with the end-user to identify the specific substances, and then ask the luminaire manufacturer to validate whether or not those particular chemicals will interact with the LEDs.

DiLouie: How do the control capabilities of LED high-bay lighting compare to HID and fluorescent, and what benefits can be achieved?

Roos: LEDs are much easier to dim than either HID or linear fluorescents, and often times the standard driver supplied with the fixture is dimmable at no additional cost. The life of the LED is not affected, even with frequent on-off cycles.

Fedoruk: In many institutional facilities there are multi-use areas (for example, gymnasiums) that in the past were always equipped with metal halide fixtures with wire guards. Now attractive instant-on dimmable luminaire (still with wire guard if needed) are available, and they can be controlled instantaneously for a play, recital, concert or basketball game.

DiLouie: In retail high-bay, issues such as color and sparkle come to the forefront. How competitive is LED compared to ceramic metal halide and similar sources in these applications? What does LED bring to the table that’s unique?

Roos: We have seen most of our retail high-bay lighting customers switch to LED. The advantages of energy savings, longer life and controls integration have trumped any concerns about “sparkle” and color. Frankly, the color rendering of today’s generation of LEDs is superior to what we were able to achieve as compared to either fluorescent or ceramic metal halide. While perhaps not quite as much of a sparkle generator as the arc tube of a CMH lamp, a very high lumen chip on board array in a glass lens still has specular qualities that can generate highlights. We occasionally see retailer preference for CMH trac fixtures for accent lighting because of higher sparkle as compared to LED, but even these instances are becoming fewer as the light emitting surface (LES) of the popular COB arrays gets even smaller.

DiLouie: What impact is the proliferation of LED products having on electrical distribution business practices in general?

Roos: Electrical distributors are stocking fewer SKU’s both because of the larger variety of fixture options and frequent generational performance upgrades that, if they are not diligent, can leave them with obsolete inventory.

DiLouie: If you could tell the entire electrical industry just one thing about LED high-bay lighting, what would it be?

Roos: LED technology is already delivering superior results and the technology will continue to improve and become more affordable. It is highly unlikely that we will go backwards, so it is wise to get on board and learn the new technology.

I enjoy receiving Ted Konnerth’s newsletter from Egret Consulting Group. Ted has an excellent big picture view of the lighting industry. Like everybody else, he doesn’t have all the answers about where things are ultimately headed, but he’s asking the right questions. The below article is republished from an issue I received the week after LIGHTFAIR, and contains some interesting observations.

On a final note, I wish you all a safe and fun July 4 weekend.

LIGHTFAIR 2015

By Ted Konnerth

15 years ago when Egret was a fledgling company, we regularly told clients that we specialize in the electrical industry; not the electronics industry. So our clients deal in amps, not milliamps. No software required, just real world stuff that requires hand tools and safety gear and steel toe boots. LightFair in those days was a sleepy organization that started regionally and slowly grew to become a national show. My, my… how things have changed.

Last week, LightFair held host to over 600 vendors on two floors of Javits. The attendance was extraordinary and the overall energy was intoxicating. Many of my meetings with senior leaders of the industry remarked that this was the best LFI in their experience. From the chair of a long-tenured lighting guy with over 15 years of leadership assessment; here are my thoughts on the impact of the conference on the general lighting industry:

· Electronics. You couldn’t walk 50 feet without running into a controls booth; incorporated into a traditional lighting booth or a stand-alone controls company. As we’ve reported for several years, LED has enabled the adoption of electronic systems into the traditional electrical industry. We are now entering a world that is markedly different, as evidenced by vendors demonstrating:

o Lighting controls

o Color controls

o Internet of Things interfaces

o Building automation interfaces

o LiFi communication protocols

· LED adoption. It’s been slowly coming, but we’ve arrived at the point where it’s no longer LED Lighting; it’s Lighting; which of course is utilizing LED. While there are a ton of issues surrounding the legacy lamp sources (i.e. will GE and Osram sell off their legacy lamps and ballasts division or simply treat them as a diminishing cash cow?), the bigger issues are innovation around the application of LED.

· Form factors. The designers have returned! Form factors are now moving into the market; from street lighting to ambient, there were a host of novel, creative and effective ways to deliver lumens to a task.

· Optics. The opportunity to grasp light at the photon level and redirect that energy into waves or sheets of light that can be optically controlled to deliver light to the seeing task with little wasted or glare losses is a new world to lighting. Forget fixture efficiencies and light loss factors; let’s talk about planar solutions to lighting the seeing task; with little to no light losses.

· Software. Sadly, grudgingly I admit defeat. We are officially in the electronic and software industry now. The interface to building systems and data analytics is too big of a step forward to overlook. Lighting now sits at the epicenter of Big Data and the IoT as the geographic toll booth to the information highway. I’m going to buy geek glasses and go find my old published Fortran programs to validate my street ‘cred’.

· New players. It is very notable that companies such as Flextronics, ABB, Ideal Industries, Mitsubishi, LG Electronics and Synapse would invest serious dollars in LightFair and announce they’re a player in Lighting? So global electronics, wire nut, IoT and power distribution companies see something in lighting that makes them want to play with the legacy guys who actually understand the maze of buying influences in selling lighting products? We’re Big Boys now.

And then there’s the absorption factor. So many new things with so many different ways to utilize lighting. The explosion of market potential for lighting on a global stage. Egret hosted our second annual Leadership Summit with CEO’s of privately held companies and discussed the impacts on Leadership for the emergence of Lighting into global industries; Energy, Health Care, Agriculture, Construction. How many leaders can claim to have direct experience in managing Lighting as a contributor to Energy, Health Care, Agriculture and Construction; plus communicate across trade influences of HVAC, Security, Data/Com, etc? And don’t forget about the nascent movement to DC power distribution; with integration of solar energy and of course… LED lighting.

The answer is None. So where do we find talent with the intellect and interest in managing complex systems on a global basis; while preserving the legacy channel relationships? It’s a legitimate question with no real answer.

Leadership will be stressed by the confluence of market expansion, technology changes and availability of talent due to the Boomer retirement and the GenX population deficit. We are in a market that has never existed before in the electrical industry. The challenges of multiple trade influences coupled with new and newer technology is daunting alone. But the strategic side of the business; defining which markets to address, the competitive landscape and the IP barriers to entry are largely new to the industry.

On the positive side; there is more opportunity for the lighting industry than at any time since Edison. The creativity of new entrants is amazing; from poultry and plant growth to color-based healing to photometric solutions that amaze… it’s a beautiful new world with plenty of room in that sandbox for a lot of new players.

And it’s even better for people who are in the business of assessing new skills, leadership and strategic thinking for an evolving new industry. And that is a very good thing for the people of Egret.

Guest post by Ted Konnerth, EGRET Consulting Group

Strategies in Light held their first joint conference with the LEDShow during the last week of February. Attendance was solid and the technical conferences featured four different tracks of presentations covering arcane technical issues to overall market influences on the adoption of LED. On Tuesday, they held their Investor Forum; a mini-version of the popular Shark Tank TV show, Investor Forum features a panel of 8 investors and a rotating presentation of emerging companies.

The conference is by far the industry leader in covering all issues pertinent to LED technology. I came away from the presentations and private meetings with a long list of interesting concepts:

• LED has had over $4B of investments over the past 10+ years and most investors have lost money in the technology. The reasons for the losses varied but one comment by the investor panel was particularly notable:
• The Channel Matters. The investor explained that bringing new technology into a legacy market takes time and energy that was largely unanticipated by the newer entrants. As many of the newer companies were in a rush to revenue, they carved their own paths to market… and mostly failed. I’ve remarked several times over the past 7-8 years that selling light bulbs is a whole lot more complicated than most people believe; and relationships matter.
• M&A valuations for LED have declined. This is a direct response to the loss history. Investors are far more wary of rosy predictions and novel solutions to selling those products.
• Acquisitions have declined. The major strategic companies had a very quiet year of acquisitions in 2014 (Acuity, Eaton, Hubbell, Cree, Philips, GE). They felt that M&A may pick up steam in 2015 and as evidenced by Acuity’s eye-popping valuation for Distech this week… we may be back in acquisition mode.
• IPO’s are expected to rise; primarily fed by the much heralded spin-off of LumiLeds by Philips.
• The available market is still huge; with the replacement lamp market estimated as 45 billion sockets with only 5% filled by LED currently. Ironically, as LED replacement lamps rise, the expected peak is a forecast decline by 2022 as the LED fulfillment and long-life shrinks the market.
• The global fixture market is estimated currently at $59B with $19B being LED. The market is projected to rise to $66B by 2022.
• Low voltage distribution is rising and is seen by many companies as a large movement in the near future; with estimates of construction cost savings of $75/sq ft or more. With LED enabling the low voltage movement, I think this will become the primary mode of power distribution in homes in the near future.
• Lighting is moving quickly into bio-genetics with new bulbs that can affect circadian rhythms, or promote plant growth or farm animal growth and integrate into newer smart devices like Nest.

And then there’s the real future; the Internet of Things (IoT). It was notable that one of the keynote speakers was a senior VP of Cisco. Cisco? At a Lighting show? Really?

Really… Cisco is heavily invested in the technology of IoT; including security and mass-adoption practices. There are currently 12B devices that connect to the internet; globally. By 2020 that number will be over 50B devices.

There are companies already developing data collection and management solutions through lighting that will feed into the Big Data movement. A ‘simple light bulb’ integrated with sensors and communication capabilities can do a lot more than light up your closet.

And one final note… the transition to LED seems to be working despite years of naysayers and skeptics. DOE reported that last year the US saved $1.8B in utility bills. And that number will grow significantly; spurring a rise in the investor-owned utility community to create new revenue streams via promoting solutions that in essence sells less of their product.

The pace of technology growth is the highest of any time in any currently living person’s life. It is exciting, confusing, bewildering and amazing. Enjoy the ride.

Peter Boyce, former head of human factors at the Lighting Research Center, recently contributed a very interesting article to LD+A. In his article, Boyce objects to vague claims the lighting industry makes concerning lighting’s impact on productivity and health. These claims, he says, tend to vanish when faced with demands for hard supporting evidence. He also describes the challenges of quantifying these benefits.

Finally, he cites five things the lighting industry needs to more clearly demonstrate lighting’s benefits:

1. Stop making vague claims about the effects of lighting on productivity, safety and health unless supported by clear epidemiological evidence and a plausible mechanism involving lighting.
2. Accept that for many activities, lighting conditions are just one factor amongst many that influence the outcome.
3. Recognize that the main role of lighting is to change visual function and that optimizing visual functions should be the basis of lighting recommendations.
4. Identify what visual functions are relevant to achieving the desired benefits for a range of common activities.
5. Measure the effect of the amount, spectrum and distribution of light on these visual functions.
6. Develop lighting recommendations for a range of common activities based on optimizing the relevant visual functions.
7. Support the collection of field data to test the benefits of different forms of lighting as predicted by the performance of the relevant visual functions.

Click here to read the article.