LED + SSL

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and PG&E recently demonstrated streetlights installed on Turk Street (between Taylor and Jones) in the Tenderloin District, networked using Echelon’s LonWorks technology. The new LED streetlights, remotely controlled and monitored, promise to reduce the city’s energy and maintenance costs while improving lighting quality and safety. Streetlights are among a city’s [...]

Cree, Inc. has launched the Product Characterization Tool, an interactive LED design tool that simplifies the task of translating nominal LED performance to real-world conditions. The online tool, accessible at Cree’s website here, allows users to easily characterize any XLamp® LED over a wide range of operating conditions, including drive current, flux bin, price and [...]

Renaissance Lighting, a developer of solid-state downlights, has been selected to the 2009 GoingGreen East 50 Top Private Company List. The GoingGreen East 50 recognition is given annually at the GoingGreen East executive conference to privately held, emerging companies that create new business opportunities in green technology. Renaissance Lighting was selected by the editorial team [...]

The OLED lighting market is setting the stage to take off in 2011, with OLED lighting revenues forecasted to surpass PMOLED displays in the 2013-2014 time frame and reach $6 billion by 2018, according to DisplaySearch’s newly-released report, OLED Lighting in 2009 and Beyond: The Bright Future. “The unique features of OLED lighting are inspiring [...]

Winners were recently announced for the first annual Next Generation Luminaires competition recognizing excellence in the design of energy-efficient LED luminaires for general illumination, white light in commercial lighting applications. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America and the International Association of Lighting Designers, the competition was launched [...]

The National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) has published LSD 44 Solid State Lighting—The Need for a New Generation of Sockets & Interconnects. The white paper includes a background discussion of lighting sockets and interconnects, from the Edison bulb to the present. It argues for the necessity of standards on solid state lighting to foster technological [...]

Recently, I wrote a two-part series on LED lighting for Electrical Contractor that you might find interesting. The first article, titled “Lighting Up to the Legend: Will LEDs replace Traditional Sources of Light?”, acknowledges the importance of LEDs as an energy-saving light source with many other benefits, but notes that the technology is still rapidly [...]

Across the United States, local governments are slashing budgets, presenting significant challenges to local government. The city of Ann Arbor, Michigan suffered a 60% reduction, spurring the search for areas to cut costs, including the city’s energy use. The city was spending more than $1.4 million a year just on streetlighting. Ann Arbor embarked on [...]

Philips has announced its MASTER LED collection of LED lamps that can be used in luminaires with E27 and GU10 sockets. The 7W E27 A55 lamp, identical in form factor to a conventional light bulb, is most interesting, suitable for retrofit of 40W incandescents for nearly 83% energy savings in general lighting applications. The lamp [...]