Squinting toward retirement: A boon for the lighting industry

By Elisa Wood
September 14, 2011

Americans report in surveys that they are likely to retire later than expected as a result of this economic downturn that doesn’t seem to want to quit. While that’s bad news for golf courses and Florida real estate, it helps one industry: energy efficient lighting.

We are squinting, rather than sprinting toward retirement these days. As part of the post-50 crowd, I very much appreciate good lighting in my work space, and I discovered that I am not alone in researching a recent report on lighting.

Why do we geezers need better lighting? A 60-year-old employee’s eyes receive only 40 percent as much light as a worker who is 30 to 40 years younger, according to a paper by Leviton. These older employees tend to dislike the one-size-fits-all lighting of most commercial buildings; in fact, find it stressful.

Lighting is best when tailored to the needs of the individual. This can be done by giving employees manual override of automated lighting, so that they can adjust brightness and color depending on what they are doing in their work station at any given moment. And of course that is one of the features touted by lighting control manufacturers – the ability of consumers to customize lighting preferences.

Why worry so much about worker comfort? Happy workers tend to stay in their jobs, and that saves employers money, says a white paper “Personal Control: Boosting Productivity, Energy Savings” by the Lighting Controls Association. New employees need about 13.5 months on the job to achieve maximum work performance. As a result, worker turnover costs a business about 1.2 to 2 times the salary allotted for the position. Research indicates that workplace design plays a significant role in employee satisfaction. And right now many people dislike the lighting, heat and acoustics of their workplace, even young folk.

Improving lighting doesn’t necessarily mean giving employees their own remotely control light bulbs – although it helps. The Light Right Consortium looked at six different lighting options in a typical office space in Albany, New York. Between 81 percent and 85 percent of employees said they were comfortable with a lighting design that provided direct/indirect lighting and wallwashing. By comparison, designs that provided light only from above received a ‘comfortable rating’ from only 69 to 71 percent of study participants. But the combination that the employees liked most included direct/indirect lighting, wallwashing and dimming controls that allowed workers to customize their lighting. This design won a ‘comfortable’ rating from 91 percent of employees.

Lighting is a booming industry. The use of LED lighting, alone, is expected to grow by 30 percent in 2011 and become a $1 billion market by 2014, according to a study, “Enterprise LED Lighting Research Report,” by Groom Energy and Greentech Media. The study targets the market for commercial and industrial LED lighting. Similar growth is occurring in the lighting controls market. Pike Research sees global revenue for lighting controls rising from $1.3 billion to $2.6 billion by 2016. Businesses, not households, are driving this growth.

Many factors account for the lighting industry’s enviable boom. But one, I think, is that it enjoys a feature most green energy products do not. Efficient and well-planned lighting provides immediate and concrete satisfaction. In contrast, I may really like the idea of my employer installing solar panels, but my senses won’t register a difference in the building’s electricity. In that regard, efficient lighting may be the “cell phone” of energy that the industry has sought for so many years – a product that can attract the mass market and turn conventional technology on its ear.

See Elisa Wood’s report “Energy Efficient Lighting Explained: A guide for business people who aren’t lighting techies”

Energy efficiency is so in right now Part II: The delight factor (and more energy puns)

Guest blog by Cara Miale
September 8, 2011

Last week, we looked at how the energy efficiency industry is working on its cool factor (Dare I say sex appeal?), to make clean energy more accessible to the masses.

Perhaps a bikini charger doesn’t make much difference when the grid is under great strain as it was this summer; but it does get people thinking about alternatives that could lead to – or add up to – more important changes.

Time to shed some light on lighting. An energy efficient approach to lighting has gained traction in the commercial world – with wireless controls, dimmers and aclear ROI for building owners. But so far, consumer touch points have largely revolved around bulb efficiency standards – which are dull, governmental and even intrusive.

There are very cool things on the horizon, like Professor Haas’ LED-light-based data transmission, which could feed our hunger for greater capacity for cell phones and all things Wi-Fi. Here are some other lighting innovations that might generate excitement at home (or rather, at your slick downtown condo):

• Mood lighting made simple. No, please – don’t get up. This LED lightbulb from Sharpcomes with a tiny remote that allows you to turn the bulb on and off, increase or decrease the brightness and even adjust the color temp (for mood lighting, perhaps?) all without lifting a finger (er, ok, barely lifting a finger). Its life is long, its efficiency impressive, but perhaps more importantly – it has novelty potential we haven’t seen since the clap-on, clap-off lamp control. The bulbs start around $40 – not cheap for the average consumer – but then again, what are a couple of Jacksons compared to how smooth you’ll look on date night?
• Party on the patio. The Oasys from Sol is a complete unit that houses their aiSUN controller, batteries, and LED fixture. When darkness falls, the party doesn’t have to end: reliable light (and again, spiffy dimming capabilities) can be yours. Although we must say, their website needs a few tips on more accessible language if they’re going to get through to us.
• Energy on display while you’re away. These days, being cool is not always about how much money you can spend – you also get bragging rights for snagging great deals (hence the Groupon boom) and saving money. The PowerCost Monitor is an inexpensive, DIY system that reads home electricity usage and transmits it to your iPhone or iPad – so you can see how much energy your pad (your house, that is) is gobbling while you’re away. You can slice and dice your data and track usage in kilowatt-hours (zzzzz) and in dollars and cents (even better).

Blue Line Innovations and People Power have also done a great job of connecting with the consumer market – they not only use mobile apps to drive their technology; they’re also all over social media, and recently moved their technology to the cloud through a partnership with PlotWatt for real time updates. They even use video to explain their product activation to users.

These are a few of my favorite, cool energy gadgets. Do you know others? Let’s encourage the trend; post in the comments section here any you’ve come across.

Cara Miale is a freelance writer in Denver, Colorado and a frequent contributor to Energy Efficiency Markets.

How much money can new lighting save your business?

By Elisa Wood
August 24, 2011

Am I average?

That’s the question that often hits me when someone quotes an ‘average’ statistic. The ‘average’ business or household seems almost mythological. Few of us fall right on that point on the line.

The same is true when it comes to often quoted energy efficiency savings statistics. For example, the US Environmental Protection Agency says that replacing one old-fashion incandescent light bulb with a compact fluorescent light will save on average $69 over the product’s lifetime.

Will your business save that much by installing new light bulbs?

Several factors come into play, some that you can control, the most obvious being how much you turn on the light.

Another important dynamic, not often discussed, is your electric rate. Rates vary dramatically through the United States. In coming up with the $69 savings figure, the EPA assumed an electric rate of 11.3 cents/kWh. If you operate a business in North Dakota, you’re paying a lot less than that for electricity, about 6.8 cents/kWh, so your savings from a CFL will be lower. If you’re in Hawaii, you are paying a lot more, about 28 cents/kWh, so your savings will be greater.

Take a look at this frequently updated chart of electricity rates in the 50 states. Is your business in one of the pricier states? If so, an investment in new lighting may quickly pay back. After you’ve found your electricity rate, you can go to this calculator and gauge what you’ll save if you switch from old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs to CFLs. This will give you a closer idea of your savings, although even with this calculation we still are dealing to some degree with averages. The electricity rate in the chart is the average for utilities in your state. Your utility can provide your specific rate.

Businesses are increasingly contemplating saving energy – and costs – by installing efficient lighting, not only CFLS, but LEDs and lighting controls. This is partly because lighting accounts for somewhere between 20 percent and 50 percent of the electricity commercial enterprises use, so the savings can be substantial. On a larger societal level, efficient lighting for businesses is important because US commercial buildings represent 47 percent of the total growth in energy expected in the US between 2010 and 2020.

Elisa Wood is a co-author of “Energy-Efficient Lighting Explained: A guide for business people who aren’t lighting techies,” published by RealEnergyWriters.com and The Daily Energy Report.

What if the light bulb produced more than light?

By Elisa Wood
Aug. 4, 2011

Talk about a light bulb moment.

A professor of engineering at Edinburgh University recently demonstrated for the first time to a wide audience his technology that uses common every day lights to transmit data.

Harald Haas streamed a video through a desk lamp at Ted Global 2011at Scotland’s Edinburgh International Conference Center in July.

If commercialized, the technology not only creates a vast new application for light, but also dramatically expands our now limited wireless capacity. Imagine downloading your email from any of the14 billion light bulbs installed in the world.

Haas’ technology swaps out our current way of transmitting data – through radio frequency – with a new approach using visible light from LED light bulbs. This is significant because we are running out of radio frequency spectrum as our appetite for wireless communication grows, Haas says. The visible light spectrum, on the other hand, is enormous, with about 10,000 times more capacity than radio frequency. Using light instead of radio frequency would give us a lot more capacity for our cell phones, wireless computers and other devices.

The energy implications are even more interesting.

First, the technology creates a new impetus for switching from incandescent light bulbs to LEDs. Until now, LED champions have argued their cause based on the light bulb’s energy efficiency. It’s a good argument, but not one that always motivates the consumer. With Haas’ technology the LED takes on new importance. LED lights are necessary because they contain a semi-conductor; incandescent light bulbs do not.

Second, the whole process of transmitting data through light is more energy efficient than using radio frequency, according to Haas. Think of it this way. We have 1.4 million cellular masts, or base stations, that now allow us to transmit data through our 5 billion cell phones worldwide. These base stations use a lot of energy, particularly for cooling, operating at only a five percent efficiency level, according to Haas. What if instead we transmitted data through the 14 billion light bulbs already installed worldwide? Haas says he’s calculated the “energy budget” and found light-based data transmission to be so efficient, it is virtually free.

“It should be so cheap that it’s everywhere. Using the visible light spectrum, which comes for free, you can piggy-back existing wireless services on the back of lighting equipment,” he says.

The technology offers some other advantages as well, particularly privacy, convenience and health assurances.

Light is more secure than radio waves. Light does not penetrate walls and radio waves do. So it appears that it would much more difficult to hack your calls via light wave than radio wave.

As for convenience, think of how you’re asked to switch off your computer on an airline, so that you don’t interfere with radio signals needed by the plane. If you were instead using the light above your seat to access the Internet, you could keep the computer on.

And last, for electric utilities, light-based transmission would eliminate customer concerns that smart meters placed on homes cause cancer. Industry research has not supported these claims. Nonetheless utility customers in some states, particularly California and Maine, have protested installation of smart meters, themselves an energy efficiency device.

How does Haas’ technology work? It all looks pretty simple. He switches on a desk lamp that uses a $3 LED light. The light beams into a hole to a receiver. The receiver detects small changes made in the light’s amplitude and converts those changes into an electronic signal. Voila! A streaming video, showing flowers opening, appears on a nearby screen. To stop the video, Haas simply passes his hand in front of the light.

Haas hopes to see the necessary microchip fitted into every lighting device: household lights, street lamps, cell phones, overhead lights on planes, traffic lights. Of course, the road to commercialization trips up many potential technologies. And he’s still working on improving data speed. (He has achieved rates of 10 MBit/s per second and hopes to achieve and 100 MBit/s by the end of this year.) But this is one to watch. See his TED talk here.

Goodbye to Light Bulb Jokes?

By Elisa Wood
April 6, 2011

Once upon a time, joking about ‘how many it takes to screw in a light bulb’ was a great way to poke fun at people’s intelligence. After all, what could be easier than screwing in a light bulb? Any idiot could do it.

Not so any more. Lighting has exploded into a sophisticated business. And for those who manage commercial buildings it can be downright intimidating.

Figuring out the difference between LEDs and CFLs is just the start. Then there are a whole range of dimmers, sensors, data loggers and controllers, both wired and wireless, and computer software to bring it all together. There are considerations to be made about light harvesting, interior space planning, and human behavior. And while learning all of this, the building manager is constantly wondering, ‘Will I really save energy? Will my utility bills drop enough to justify the investment?”

Clanton & Associates, a Silicon Valley lighting company, is trying to help answer the big cost questions in a newly released, six-month study of life cycle costs for lighting control systems and technologies. Researchers looked at buildings in Boston and Los Angeles that had installed efficient lighting systems.

Dane Sanders, professional engineer at Clanton & Associates, says his company was trying to address the “fear factor” that exists for building owners when it comes to lighting projects. “The growth of these types of systems is happening so fast that keeping up with the technology is difficult,” he said. “This helps people understand the real benefits of advanced lighting control, and gives some basis for people to make decisions about what lighting control systems best suit their ends.”

The study offers some interesting findings for those making their way through the maze of options. Wireless controls, for example, deliver up to 25% lower lifetime costs than comparable wired systems, according to the paper.

Wireless systems with full dimming capability – a Cadillac system — seem to offer the best bang for the buck. “It pays back relatively soon; that is a very interesting conclusion. Just doing the minimum isn’t necessarily the best. A bit more investment upfront can pay back very quickly,” he said.

Dimmers also get points for being less jarring on the eyes than a sudden on/off of lights. “With dimming it happens slowly and smoothly and is imperceptible,” Sanders said.

In addition, it does make a difference who sits where in a building. The study finds the ‘inverted space plan’ works best, even though it runs counter to traditional office planning. In the inverted plan open offices are located on the perimeter, where the maximum number of people can take advantage of natural lighting. Private offices are pushed to the interior

Underwritten by Daintree Networks, the study can be downloaded free of charge here.

This blog is open source & copyright free with attribution to www.realenergywriters.com.

Breaking light bulb myths

By Elisa Wood
March 16, 2011

I have to agree with the Tea Party; the US government should not choose the light bulbs I use in my home. And fortunately, it does not.

Yet that’s the spin being pushed by those who want to roll back federal lighting performance standards. An odd mythology is developing around the standards.

Opponents claim that the standards amount to government picking and choosing winners and forcing them upon us. More specifically, they say that the feds have banned the incandescent light bulb, which has been around since Thomas Edison’s time.

This is not true; the incandescent light bulb is not being banned; the standards are agnostic about technology type as long as they perform as required. The 2007 law is meant to act as a market mechanism that encourages innovation. With a benchmark to work towards, scientists, engineers and product designers are working to displace older, inefficient devices. Already several different kind of light bulbs have made their way into the marketplace, including a new and better incandescent.

We have efficiency standards not only for light bulbs, but also for refrigerators, water heaters, air conditioners, microwaves and other appliances. They are nothing new. Those who see them as government intrusion may be surprised to find that the first US appliance standards were set under Ronald Reagan.

Still one might ask, do we really need appliance standards? Are they worth the bother? That’s a $300 billion question – the amount the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy estimates the US will save on electricity costs by 2030 through existing appliance and lighting standards.

Here are other important points about appliance standards made by Steven Nadel, ACEEE’s executive director, in a testimony on March 10 before the US Senate’s Energy and Natural Resource Committee. Nadel urged that Congress reject S. 395, the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act (BULB), which would repeal lighting standards set in 2007 under the Bush administration.

• Appliance standards generated 340,000 net jobs in the U.S. in 2010.
• The majority of the standards are based on consensus agreements between manufacturers and energy efficiency advocates.
• Four types of bulbs already meet the standards, although the standards do not take effect until 2012. Two are incandescent bulbs.
• The 2007 lighting standards, alone, are expected to reduce annual electricity use by 72 billion kWh by 2020, enough to serve the annual electricity needs of 6.6 million average households and avoid construction of about 30 power plants.
• ACEEE forecasts that the lighting standards will reduce consumer energy bills by more than $7 billion by 2020, or about $50 per American household annually.
• A recent USA Today survey of 1,016 adults found that despite misinformation circulated about a light bulb ban, 61% of Americans favor the 2007 lighting standards, while 31% say they are bad.

This blog is open source & copyright free with attribution to www.realenergywriters.com