By Joe Salimando
Salimando is a Fairfax, Virginia-based writer and contributor to energysolutions.necanet.org, eleblog.com, and tedmag.com.
Reach him at ecdotcom@gmail.com
The U.S. ban on incandescent light bulbs that are said to be too inefficient will “phase in” completely in 2014. After that, it is thought, fluorescents (including screw-in types) and LEDs (including replacements for linear fluorescents) will battle it out . . . unimpeded by a low-priced, popular alternative that dates back to T.A. Edison.
Based on what I’ve heard/read, I have assumptions about Lighting’s near-term future:
1. Linear LED tubes, recently judged to be in need of serious improvement, will get it.
2. Sooner or later, most commercial buildings will have these energy-saving LED tubes in the ceiling. If you didn’t see the 11/30/11 Wall Street Journal article – well, click through to The Math Changes On Bulbs (hint: it’s all about maintenance savings).
3. LEDs might last 50,000 hours (and more). One can envision a future in which the commercial lighting replacement business (at the very least) is increasingly less available to electrical contractors and distributors.
However that works out, what I learned recently is: Maybe it’s not all that important.
LED conference segment
I attended Ecosystems for SSL, an event put together by Intertech PIRA – which does meetings for the LED business. One of two co-chairs said the meeting, which had a relatively small number of attendees, was basically a “think tank.”
Marc Chason, editor in chief of Global LEDs/OLEDs, was first up. He’s thought a lot more about LEDs than I have. One possibility, he indicated: LEDs may well wreck the market for . . . LEDs!
See the graphic (from Chason’s slide deck) below.
Chason posted a few words (from an article that included in its headline Beware The Lighting Decline from LED’s Long Lifetimes). As seen in the graphic, there’s a projected dip in the world market for LEDs in the “out years” after LEDs go mass-market. Will this happen? I don’t know.
What it means for contractors is that the Lighting business – starting right now – is going to be about coping with serious amounts of change. It may well stay that way until the 2020s.
More reduction?
While pondering limitations on the lighting market’s future growth, I remembered something in NEMA’s electroindustry magazine. On page 24 (which you can see here) of November’s issue, NEMA said it had formed a Daylight Management Council.
From what I’ve heard (in conferences) about daylighting, it isn’t as easy as including more windows In a building’s design. The Lighting system has to cope with changes in the light supplied by natural sources – as in, the Sun sets; or the Sun spends a day playing peek-a-boo, thanks to heavy cloud cover.
Certainly, daylighting means less use of light fixtures; it might even mean fewer fixtures to be installed.
Perhaps new buildings that make heavy use of daylighting will lead electrical contractors to focus more on lighting controls – which will certainly need to be commissioned and perhaps tweaked further over time.