Credit: Alan Tulla, Lux Technical Editor:
Almost by definition, a warehouse is a large area. If there are people working in there (it is an if – some warehouses are fully automated) then it must be illuminated to a decent level. This means the energy consumption can end up being high, unless you do something about it.
In essence, there are two types of warehouse: those with racking and those without. This will determine the lighting layout and the controls to use. Some are large open areas where goods, often on pallets, are stored no more than, say, 1.5m high. It’s a good idea when designing the lighting to install more, lower wattage luminaires with a wide light distribution. They are installed closer together to minimise shadowing and give good vertical illumination.
The other type of warehouse, which is very common, uses racking, often to a high level, maybe 6-10m.
Our warehouse uses a combination of both. On the subject of storage areas, EN 12464 says that a continuously occupied space where little perception of detail is required should be lit to 200 lx. Manned gangways/aisles should be lit to 150 lx. The vertical illuminance on the racks should also be 200 lx.
To get the greatest benefit from a control system, you must know how the warehouse is used. How long do staff stay in certain areas? Do they cluster in one spot? How much movement is there in the aisles? If you don’t ask these questions, you won’t achieve the best result.
One of the biggest savings to be made is in unoccupied aisles. I went to a distribution centre for a major wholesaler that had literally dozens of aisles. These aisles were a good 30m long, maybe more than 40m. However, at any one time, only about a quarter of the aisles were occupied.
These guys knew their controls and had installed movement detectors at the ends and along the aisles. When the aisle was empty, the luminaires dimmed to 10 per cent. As soon as someone entered, the luminaires switched to full brightness giving 200 lux both horizontally and vertically. They had further refined the technique, and achieved greater savings, by switching on only those luminaires in the vicinity of the person picking the goods. Further down the aisle, and behind, the luminaires were dimmed.
Ex-Or’s QuickSet Pro setup device
Outside the aisles, savings can be made by zoning so that only the occupied areas are illuminated to full output. But beware, switching off totally can make a place look gloomy and desolate; it might even be a health and safety hazard. It’s much better to dim to 50 or 25 per cent.
If you have ever done a Leni calculation, you will know that it includes a figure for the quiescent power load of the sensors. This is also known as the parasitic load. The Ex-Or unit used here has a low rating of 150mW.
One final point that needs to be mentioned is ease of setup. With some other suppliers, commissioning can be a pain and may even require an outside specialist. Ex-Or has devoted a lot of effort developing its QuickSet Pro handheld setup controller.
Our warehouse is 25 x 50m and 14m to the apex. It is lit to 200 lux using three different types of luminaire.
This gives a general view of the whole warehouse fully lit. Like many warehouses, several types of luminaire are used. Above the tall aisles, the luminaires have a narrow oval shape that distributes the light along the aisles but minimises it in the other axis to avoid hot spots. These can be fitted with individual LightSpot HD sensors to track movement along the aisle. Alternatively, you can group the sensors. They can be controlled by Dali or DSI signals. At the ends, a mask can be fitted on the sensor so movement in the open area doesn’t trigger the aisle lights.
In the open area, mounted at the same height, are high bays with a symmetrical distribution. It’s worth noting that the Ex-Or sensor is available for different mounting heights from 2.5-16m.
Finally, there is a low level section which is used for heavy goods or which have hard-to-read labels.
PIR sensor showing tilting sensor
Controls can sometimes be difficult to illustrate in a static picture. If the lights were switched off, you would see nothing. This option uses PIR controls so the luminaires only operate when people are using the aisles.
Here, the tall aisles have been switched off because no-one is using them. The low area in the foreground is at full brightness. This is switched by the standard HD sensor. This covers an area approximately 10m in diameter. Ex-Or is proud of the optics in its products and this unit will detect large movement at the edges of the area – when someone enters the space, for example – but the central area, about 7m in diameter, will detect small movements such as staff entering data into a notepad. The HD unit contains 155 detection points, three times as many as some on the market.
The foreground open area is at 100 per cent because it is still in use, but it would be worth zoning those luminaires at the edges, especially in a larger warehouse.
Installed sensor seen from below
Arrangement Mounted centrally
Energy saving Can be significant with intermittent use
This is the night shift. Only a few staff are working. There is no activity in the foreground and so the luminaires are dimmed to 10 per cent. This saves energy but also means there is some illumination for safety reasons and to give the staff a feeling of security. Elsewhere, the luminaires are off or at 10 per cent.
The luminaires are at 100 per cent all along the working aisle because the angle of the detector high up picks up all the movement. A useful feature of the LightSpot HD detector is that you can link a master detector to three bus sensors. Look for QuickLink in the literature. This means that data such as occupancy and light levels can be shared across the sensors.
Each detector has its own memory chip that contains particular settings such as illumination level, timing and switching frequency. These settings can be altered from ground level using the QuickSet Pro controller. This controller can also download the recorded data and then upload it to a computer or energy management software.
PIR sensor unit showing Dali and digital connections
Control type High-level PIR
Arrangement Master plus bus sensor
Energy saving The greatest savings come from switching off what isn’t needed
Visit www.novelenergylighting.com to explore our range of LED High Bays, occupancy sensors, and controls. Please give us a call to discuss your project needs: Tel. 0208-540-8287, or email us: sales@novelenergylighting.com. We stock a wide range of LED highbays, including Philips Coreline highbay, GE Albeo highbay, MEGE LED Linear Highbays, and YYC LED Highbays
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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).
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.
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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