Energy Efficient Lighting

Archive for October 2015

Oct/15

29

Royal Mail delivers on energy savings

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Royal Mail delivers on energy savings

Royal Mail has replaced fluorescent lamps with LEDs at 16 centres across the UK, saving 11GWh of energy per annum

Royal Mail Group has reduced its energy demands by 11GWh per annum by replacing lighting with LED lamps and additional controls across 16 mail centres within the UK. The replacement programme converted 200,000 m2 of operational floor space and saw the removal of approximately 20,000 fluorescent lamps. The financial payback period was 2.5 years.

The LED lighting replacement programme represents a significant commitment by Royal Mail Group to reduce energy usage throughout its portfolio. In addition to the 11GWh annual energy saving, further substantial benefits include a reduced maintenance liability by the removal of fluorescent lamps.

Royal Mail worked closely with the contractors and supply chain to optimise a programme designed to have zero impact on mail centre operations in terms of mail throughput and disruption. Royal Mail Group Property engaged with its internal ‘Environment Pillars’ and operations teams to assist with the coordination of the installation programme to ensure good practice and optimise savings.

The programme also incorporated the installation of daylight dimmable lighting controls on several projects together with PIR sensors to maximise energy savings and harness natural daylight. This has proven extremely effective and ensured additional energy savings have been generated.

The Royal Mail Group also integrated measurement and verification (M&V) in accordance with the International Measurement & Verification Protocol (IPMVP) at each site undergoing LED replacement. The M&V was undertaken by independent IPMVP-certified consultants. This provided a robust verification process, delivering evidence that targeted energy savings were being achieved and giving confidence for future deployment of LED low energy lighting schemes.

For more on this project, don’t miss LuxLive, where John Bradshaw, engineering and technical services manager at Royal Mail, will talk delegates through the rollout of LEDs and controls to the 16 UK mail centres

The project is shortlisted for the Lux Awards, also on Thursday 19 November.

 

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Oct/15

29

GE Lighting disappears in radical restructure

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Looks like a streetlight, acts like a computer: GE LED streetlights in San Diego, where intelligent, connected lighting could monitor things like traffic and crime. The new ‘Current’ services group embraces CEO Jeff Immelt’s industrial internet strategy, treating LEDs as computers that route information. The conventional lighting group -no longer called GE Lighting- keeps the old stuff. It’s possibly for sale.

How do you make a viable business out of selling price-wracked LED lighting? If you’re a big industrial conglomerate like General Electric Co., you basically stop treating the bulbs as a sales and profit item, and instead consider them as a tool and a cost in a radically reshaped model that relies on selling a wide range of industrial and commercial services.
That is the take-away message from the $148.6 billion industrial giant’s most recent reorganisation of its lighting business in which it moved commercial and industrial LEDs into a broad new $1 billion “startup” energy services business called Current.
Less well-known in the shift: GE also quietly rubbed out its venerable GE Lighting escutcheon, and rebranded it as the Consumer and Conventional Lighting segment, including incandescent and fluorescent lighting as well as residential LEDs. Some observers expect GE to eventually sell that group, which meanwhile will continue to emphasise the sales of bulbs rather than fully embracing the newfangled service ethos of Current.
The idea of Current is that LEDs with all of their digital proclivities – including sensor and network connections – will be intelligent cogs in a wheel collecting and disseminating data for GE’s commercial and industrial customers. A Walmart might use LED-based ‘visible light communication’ to watch shoppers around physical stores and entice them with tailored promotions that the retailer sends to individuals’ phones. A city like San Diego might use streetlight sensors to monitor and manage traffic, crime, air quality and many other things.
It’s all part of GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s overarching ‘industrial internet’ strategy. Immelt has staked the future of the company on digitally connecting the tools and objects of the industrial world to create nothing less than what he calls ‘the next industrial era.’
‘GE is leading the way towards an age of brilliant machines that can harness reams of data to deliver transformative progress for people and businesses around the world,’ Immelt said when delivering the company’s annual 2014 results earlier this year, calling the industrial internet, ‘the connective tissue of twenty-first century infrastructure,’ and ‘the most important initiative I have led at GE.’
ANYTHING THAT CAN BE DIGITISED WILL BE
GE’s goal is to embed and connect sensors into everything in its habitat, whether it’s jet engines, gas turbines, locomotives or light bulbs. Those networked sensors would allow customers to gather data that helps them run the assets more efficiently, and users could leverage for other business purposes, such as analyzing shoppers’ movements.
From a lighting perspective, Current – officially called ‘Current, powered by GE’ – will not only help a commercial user engage with customers or manage inventory. It would also feed LED-linked information into GE’s cloud-based analytical software called Predix that scrutinizes mountains of data from a users’ solar panels, energy storage devices, electric vehicle charging stations and other sources, and helps make the most efficient use of electricity and decide things like when to sell excess power to the grid in the case of users generating their own.
‘It’s all about bringing to our customers what they tell us they’re looking for from a company like GE, and that’s to help them in a more holistic way solve a burning problem, which is how they become more energy efficient, more sustainable, and think in more of a solutions oriented approach (rather than ) a one-off solution or point solution,’ Current CEO and former GE Lighting CEO Maryrose Sylvester told Lux in an interview.
Current potentially puts teeth into Immelt’s industrial internet bite. And it could restore the financial outlook for the lighting business, where revenues from Sylvester’s so-called ‘point solutions’ appear to be in decline, or static at best. A year ago, around the time of GE’s last lighting reshuffle, the company told Lux that lighting had accounted for about $3 billion in revenue in 2013. Published reports indicate that the number fell to around $2.5 billion in 2014.
Sylvester would not verify the decrease. Publicly held GE does not break out lighting revenues in its financial line reporting. It includes them as part of ‘appliances & lighting’, a segment that includes washers and dryers and that GE is unloading to Swedish appliance firm Electrolux in a deal that has been delayed by antitrust scrutiny. The company’s Current press release last week described lighting as a $3 billion business.
PRICE DECLINES AND GUNSHOTS
While volume sales of LED lamps have grown, prices have dropped considerably. Three years ago they were around $25. Consumers balked, even with LEDs’ compelling attributes of providing 80-to-90 percent energy reduction, and lasting for a reputed 20 years or more. Today, sub-$5 prices are common for a single bulb; US retailer Home Depot is selling a 3-pack of GE 60-watt equivalent lamps for $10.97, or about $3.65 per unit.
‘The paybacks are getting to a point where it becomes a really good choice,’ notes Sylvester.
A good choice for consumers, but not one that supports a long term profitable business for GE, especially considering that there isn’t much of a replacement market for a product that lasts 20 years or more. Making things even tougher for an incumbent company like GE is that it continues to carry the costs of a traditonal lighitng business, including factories. Even as GE reported on Friday (16 Oct) that LED revenue was up 65 percent for the third quarter and now represents 39 percent of the lighting business, the cost and price outlook almost certainly taints the profits.
Thus, GE is moving to a Current-branded service-based business model, in which LEDs are a sort of loss leading but vital tool in a data services scheme. Those services are potentially as varied as anything that can be digitised in the potentially ubiquitous Internet of Things.
For example, GE is already piloting smart, Predix-connected streetlighting in San Diego and in Jacksonville, Fla., where sensors mounted on luminaires are helping with things like traffic and emergency response. Public outdoor smart city lighting schemes are taking hold in cities around the world, not just from GE, supporting a wide variety of operation such as parking, traffic, air quality, noise and even monitoring the bird population.
In an acoustic addition to its sensor stable, GE at the end of September began working with SST Inc. to use that company’s ShotSpotter technology to detect gunshots, which could link into police force and public safety operations.
SPY LIGHTS FOR RETAILERS
GE’s smart lighting reach extends to indoor environments such as Wal-mart and Walgreens – the largest drugstore chain in the US – which are already using GE LED lighting for energy saving purposes. Sylvester noted that GE is talking to both of them about possibly deploying visible light communication (VLC), a technology that GE is already piloting with two retailers each in the U.S. and Europe (it won’t reveal who).
In Europe, lighting rival Philips has signed up a Carrefour retail store in northern France to trial VLC. In the U.S., retail giant Target is also using the technology at a small number of stores, although Target declines to discuss the implementation or to identify the vendor.
Not to be forgotten in the brave new play of lighting-based digital services is that the LEDs will still, of course, provide illumination, even if lighting is ironically looking like an afterthought.
And while the LEDs will still offer significant energy advantages, those will become more de rigueur.
‘It’s our view that the energy efficiency benefit will be less material in a few years,’ notes Jed Dorsheimer, an analyst with investment bank Canaccord Genuity. ‘That’s not to say it’s less important. But the drivers toward solid state lighting will be about the other services and the things you can do when you digitise all these sockets.
‘For a large retailer, knowing what the floor traffic is on a real time basis and being able to harness that is probably more valuable in terms of inventory management than the energy savings are to their utility bill.’
Which is why GE, while retaining conventional lighting, will as Sylvester notes put ‘all the heavy investment…into the LED space.’
WITHER CONVENTIONAL LIGHTING?
That, in turn, rekindles speculation that GE will want to unload its traditional lighting business, now called Consumer and Conventional Lighting (CCL) after the breakup of GE Lighting into Current and CCL.
‘What happens to the GE Lighting legacy is a good question – I think it may mean that GE will be looking at selling that part of the business to somebody else, because in the end, it doesn’t form part of the core of GE,’ notes David Vos, an analyst with Barclays.
GE’s Sylvester says GE remains committed to the business, even after the breakup of GE Lighting. ‘We work to make sure we have the right products available for our customers when they need them,’ she says. Sylvester will oversee CCL as CEO; John Strainic will run it day-to-day as chief operations officer. Strainic had been general manager of GE’s North America consumer lighting.
It’s reminiscent of a year ago, when GE’s Beth Comstock, now vice chair, told Lux then that GE Lighting was not for sale. Soon after, GE disclosed a lighting reorganisation in which it aligned GE Lighting with an innovation group headed by Comstock.
The creation of Current marks the company’s latest attempt to stir up its LED business with an innovative business model. GE calls Current a ‘startup’ that groups together lighting with other existing business streams including revenue related to solar panels, electric vehicles and energy storage. It plans to grow those revenues from around $1 billion today to $5 billion by 2020.
It is piloting Current services with customers including Walgreens, Simon Property Group, Hilton Worldwide, JP Morgan Chase, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), Intel and Trane, a brand of Ingersoll Rand, all of whom hope to drive energy efficiency, reduce costs and leverage data from connected devices like light bulbs.
‘It will be interesting to see how much commitment they’re truly going to make, or whether this is more of a marketing and PR type initiative,’ notes Canaccord’s Dorsheimer.
Wherever Current lies in the reality-to-PR spectrum, it’s coming from the very top of GE.
‘The combination of LEDs and analytics puts a computer where a light bulb used to be,’ CEO Immelt said earlier this year. ‘In cities around the world, GE is working to transform street lighting into the analytical brain of urban life. Today, lighting is becoming a high-tech infrastructure business. It is a gateway for most energy management solutions.’
Whether it is a profitable gateway remains to be seen.
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Photo is from GE

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Oct/15

21

Video – How hospital lighting can help patients and save energy

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A panel of NHS facilities and energy managers and lighting professionals come together to discuss how lighting in hospitals can be tackled to improve patient outcomes and save energy

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Oct/15

21

How hospital lighting can help patients and save energy

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A panel of NHS facilities and energy managers and lighting professionals come together to discuss how lighting in hospitals can be tackled to improve patient outcomes and save energy

NHS Trusts are in the midst of a period of huge technological change. The rise of LEDs and controls are enabling Trusts to benefit from huge energy savings and improved quality of light, with paybacks of under five years. At the same time, there is a growing awareness of the potential health benefits of biodynamic and circadian lighting, yet there are still very few examples of this cutting-edge thinking appearing on patient wards. Is this because there is a reluctance to innovate within Trusts or is it because the science behind circadian lighting is still not fully understood?
Lux, in association with Aurora, invited a panel of industry experts, with participants including facilities managers and engineers from NHS Trusts, lighting designers and consultants, to its Healthcare Forum to discuss the issues in a roundtable discussion. Key areas covered included:
  • What are the real benefits of investing in new lighting technology for healthcare?
  • What are the key mistakes to avoid when upgrading lighting?
  • What’s the latest knowledge on how lighting influences patient outcomes?
  • How can we make healthier lighting a reality in healthcare facilities?
  • How can healthcare bodies get funding for lighting upgrades?
Lack of investment
Trusts face wide-ranging challenges, from aging buildings, with lack of investment in lighting over the years, through to tough financial constraints. “We have buildings with a diverse age – from the 1920s and 1930s through to new build,” said Rob Hocking, electrical team leader at Southend University Hospital NHS Trust. “We need to standardise lighting systems so that we can reduce stock and react quicker to call-outs.”
“The funding is starting to come through now, but there has been a lack of investment in new technology,” said Kevin Tinson, estates operations manager at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust. “We have one hospital using T12 lamps, with two shipping containers full of T12 replacements. We are faced with a lot of work to catch up.”
Damian Oatway, senior sustainability engineer at Manchester Royal Infirmary said there was a resistance to anything new. “Unless the technology is proven and you can justify investment in terms of energy savings, it’s difficult. Exiting PFI contracts are also a problem because they often stipulate like-for-like replacement.”
Quality of LED lamps had also been an issue for Trusts in the past. “We have had to replace a batch of 250 LEDs, despite them being CE-marked,” said Ehsan Sattar, assistant director of projects and estates energy manager at Royal Marsden Hospital. “It’s a challenge when there are so many different products, colour rendering capabilities, lifetimes and lead times. How can we ensure the quality?”
Shyel Stark, product manager at Aurora, called on Trusts to pick the right partner and look for those suppliers that can offer back-up support and warranties.
“The quality of LEDs is much improved,” said Dina Chowdury, senior lighting designer at Lighting Design House. “You can get LEDs with 2700K colour temperatures now and CRIs of 90 which perform like halogens. But whereas halogens can all run on the same transformers, every LED lamp has a different driver. Standardisation is needed because otherwise the NHS will be left with an inventory problem.”
Not just about energy
While energy savings may be the initial driver for upgrading to LED, with typically 45% of a hospital’s electrical load coming from the lighting, the Forum highlighted a range of other issues. “The improved product life means that there is less likely to be an impact on operations, there is greater awareness of the effect of lighting on seasonal affective disorder and dementia and the role of flicker in patients with autism,” said Paul Davidson, Aurora’s group technical and project manager.
There also needs to be better guidance on what works and what doesn’t and what is considered best practice. This would help me to convince people further up the chain and get funding”
Damian Oatway
Lighting Design House is a big advocate of biodynamic lighting and has introduced the technology into its own offices with positive results. “In hospitals, the ideal is to have LED panels to achieve general lighting of 150 lux on wards, which can be automated with manual override at the nurse station,” says Chowdury. “Patients would then have local task lighting via a bedside light, with colour options that they can control. The perfect formula is a pinch of blue to kickstart activity, a dollop of sunlight, some swirls of visual delight, a pinch of amber red later in the day and a big dollop of darkness to aid sleep.”
Damian Oatway felt that lighting has such a big influence in hospitals that there was a role for a lighting manager within Trusts. “There also needs to be better guidance on what works and what doesn’t and what is considered best practice. This would help me to convince people further up the chain and get funding.”
There was generally a lack of lighting expertise within Trusts. “It’s up to me to advise and get the estates team to buy into improvements and install them. It can be a slow process,” said David Willey, energy manager at Whittington Hospital NHS Trust.
Where’s the money coming from?
Funding will always be an issue within the NHS, and experiences differed around the table. “The money is there if we can get a payback of four-and-a-half years or less,” said Oatway. Others were finding funds difficult to come by, with expenditure on new buildings meaning less money for lighting upgrades.
Funds for energy improvements are available through Government-backed organisation Salix Finance as interest-free loans. “A new NHS funding team has been created this year and LED installations account for the greatest number of projects so far,” said Sameen Khan, client support officer at Salix. “Savings can be achieved with paybacks of less than five years.”
The Lux Healthcare Forum was sponsored by Aurora

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Oct/15

15

Kara – the New Integrated LED Interior Floodlight from Megaman UK

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Energy saving lighting expert Megaman UK has introduced the Kara integrated LED interior floodlight to its rapidly expanding fixtures range.

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The 26W integrated fixture, Kara, delivers an excellent performance with up to 2400 lumens, two colour temperature options – 3000k and 4000k and a lamp life of up to 50,000 hours.  The fitting has a fully adjustable tilting head which makes it perfect for applications such as retail cabinets and window displays where precision light is required. Kara is also an excellent choice for general retail displays and wall lighting.  The Kara LED floodlight is also available as an emergency lighting option.

Kara comes with Megaman’s generous 3 year warranty, for more information on Kara and the wide range of fixtures offered see the website: www.novelenergylighting.com 

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Oct/15

15

Breakthrough LED tech unveiled

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Lux Reports:

Quantum dot technology set to be commercialised…European lamp ban goes ahead…and a new lighting show for the Middle East. Lux Today Oct 13 2015 presented by Courtney Ferguson.

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Oct/15

8

EU drives take-up of LED streetlights through EPC

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The EU Streetlight-EPC initiative aims to use energy performance contracting to stimulate roadlighting refurbishment

Lux Reports: The EU-backed Streetlight-EPC initiative aims to stimulate use of energy performance contracting (EPC) to drive take-up of energy-efficient streelighting refurbishment. The project hopes to get 36 EPC projects up and running in nine regions across the EU.

Most European regions have not yet seen a significant take-up of EPC, which can be a good funding mechanism in streetlighting refurbishment, where there are high energy costs and huge potential for savings. Apart from legal barriers, this can be attributed to the lack of understanding and trust in EPC and the absence of experienced energy service companies (ESCOs) and organisations facilitating the EPC market.

In Europe, streetlighting consumes a significant amount of electricity: there are more than 56 million streetlighting luminaires in operation, with an estimated electricity consumption of 35 TWh. For municipalities with older, inefficient systems, streetlighting can account for 30-50% of their total electricity consumption. The recent market introduction of LED technology for streetlighting offers high savings with comparatively short payback times.

The Streetlight-EPC project creates demand and supply for EPC projects by setting up regional EPC facilitation services. These services provide comprehensive support to both municipalities and SMEs as potential ESCOs. The nine regions in the scheme are Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Poland, Ireland, Sweden, Slovenia, Macedonia and Spain.

The project aims to implement 36 EPC projects, triggering investments worth €49 million, achieving annual savings of 32,100 MWh and €4.8 million. It aims to help 18 SMEs to become ESCOs.

A scheme in Palencia, Spain is a pioneer project. The town has a population of 81,000 and has 11,000 lighting points. High-pressure sodium and mercury lamps were being used, frequently with low efficiency and insufficient colour rendering. As a first step, 3,139 luminaires were changed to LED and a dimming control system was installed. The 12-year EPC contract will guarantee energy savings of 75%, with total savings of €2 million.

The Streetlight-EPC project started on 1 April 2014 and will run until 31 March 2017.

Visit www.novelenergylighting.com to explore your LED streetlighting needs. Or call us on 0208-540-8287.

 

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Oct/15

6

Philips chief in passionate plea: ‘What are we waiting for?’

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Published on 29 Sep 2015
Philips Lighting chief Eric Rondolat has called on international business leaders to act on climate change by embracing new lighting technologies. PLUS: Internet of Things is theme of this year’s LuxLive show in London. Lux Today 29 September 2015 presented by Courtney Ferguson.

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Oct/15

6

EC upholds decision to ban mains-voltage directional halogens

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EU review found no reason to delay the ban on mains voltage directional halogen lamps

The European Commission has stuck with its decision to phase out mains-voltage halogen directional lamps from the European market in September 2016 following a review. The move has been described as a win for consumers and the environment by industry figures.

“Earlier this year we saw an EU vote delaying the phase out of non-directional halogen lamps until 2018 and this threw into question which way the balance would swing for their mains-voltage directional cousins,” commented Fred Bass, managing director of Neonlite International, owner of Megaman. “However, common sense has ruled and these highly inefficient light sources will now be phased out within a year.”

As part of the review of the lighting directive EC 1194/2012, four criteria needed to be assessed before a phase-out could be confirmed. Issues of affordability were under scrutiny, as well performance, equivalence to existing models and compatibility. The EU has confirmed that there is no reason to delay the ban on mains voltage directional halogen lamps, as all these areas have been sufficiently met.

“This ruling brings us one step closer to the eventual removal of all high-energy consuming halogens and can only be a positive move for both consumers and the environment alike,” Bass told Lux. “I stand by what I said when commenting on the delay in banning non-directional halogens earlier in the year, I truly believe that market forces will begin to take over in Europe and LEDs will win through, no matter when all halogens are eventually banned. High quality LED lamps are out there already, they do save money and energy and consumers will begin to convert to them more and more as they realise the benefits.”

Retrofit your premises with LED lighting today. Visit www.novelenergylighting.com to review our range of LED GU10 and LED MR16 lamps amongst other types. Call us to discuss volume orders: Tel: 0208-540-8287

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