Pioneering smart-lighting revolutionises European city. PLUS: President Obama gives Detroit an LED parting gift. AND: Australia launches free LED luminaire scheme. Lux 31 January 2017

EU pledges millions to tackle IoT security threat. PLUS: Reykjavik turns off street lights for better aurora view. AND: US speedway becomes first to go all LED. Lux Today October 18 2016

British Gas, the UK power utility that is blazing smart home trails with its Hive connected heating system, is now staking a claim to the residential smart lighting market by adding LED lamps to the system, a move that could signal the arrival of other major utilities into the home smart lighting arena.

Through a partnership with LED company Aurora Group, British Gas in June began offering intelligent Hive-branded LED bulbs that tie into the Hive home internet hub, allowing users to wirelessly turn lights on and off and brighten and dim them from anywhere via an app. Last week, it beefed up the offering with bulbs that will change colours and colour temperature.

The LED lamps, supplied by Aurora, are the latest addition to the ever-expanding Hive ecosystem. British Gas – the largest power utility in Britain – launched Hive Active Heating in July 2015 to allow customers to control heating and hot water from computers and gadgets either at home or from around the world. Early this year it added ‘smart plug’ and ‘smart sensor’ products; the plug lets nervous users switch off an outlet if they fear they’ve left the iron on, and the sensors send alerts if they detect motion through a door or window.

Lighting – called Hive Active Light – now fits neatly into the same scheme. Traveling users can, for example, schedule lights to switch on and change brightness as a burglar deterrent. Or they can do the same for their own mood and comfort when they’re at home. A new Hive bulb from Aurora now lets users change colours. Another lets customers tune the colour temperature of white light, in line with the emerging field of ‘circadian lighting’ in which blue-tinged white light can help stimulate people, and red-tinged white light can foster relaxation.

The new products follow on the heels of Hive allowing users to control the Aurora lights with verbal commands using Amazon’s Echo hardware and Alexa software. Hive also works with the ‘if this then that’ tool from service company IFTTT, which lets users program lights to trigger or respond to other things. Clearly, Hive has move beyond its heating roots.

‘Although we started out by launching our smart thermostat, we are more than a central heating business,’ Hive product and commercial director Tom Guy told Lux. ‘For some, the benefits of smart lighting will be about the peace of mind that, while you’re away on business or holiday, you’ve scheduled your lights to come on. For others, it will be about setting the perfect ambience to unwind after a stressful day. For these reasons, smart lighting has the ability to transform people’s experience of the space they live in.’

Guy added that Hive will continue to add functions, and to innovate ways for users to engage with the system. For instance, users can express vocal requests to Amazon’s Alexa in about 80 different phrases germane to the UK , including ‘Alexa, bosh my lights on,’ Guy said.

Internet of Things

It’s all part of the fledging Internet of Things (IoT) in which anything that can be digitised will be for the purposes of improving controls and operations, and of gathering and analysing data.

It is also key to the general beyond illumination movement that is driving the lighting industry in the modern era in which LED lamps are expected to

last for a couple of decades and thus deprive vendors of revenue from replacement sales, long their financial bread-and-butter in the days of traditional incandescent lighting.

Although many LED lighting vendors are touting smart lighting, the concept has been slow to catch on in the home, where it has had something of a limited, upmarket niche appeal. One reason is that in many instances users have to purchase expensive starter kits.

Still, smart home lighting appears poised for a breakthrough. In a recent survey, consulting giant Deloitte said that 40 percent of consumers identified lights as an appliance they would most likely replace with a connected device – tying for the lead with thermostats, which also weighed in at 40 percent. Next came security cameras, at 33 percent, followed by security alarms and fridges, at 30 percent each.

And in its recent annual ‘socket survey,’ Sylvania reported that 76 percent of people agree that ‘smart lighting will eventually replace regular lighting.’

Aurora believes that associating with a utility like British Gas, which has direct access to over 14 million homes in the UK, will help kick-start consumers into deploying Internet-connected lighting.

At your service

The partnership also moves Aurora into the realm of a service industry, which is where many modern lighting companies are trying to position themselves in the face of waning replacement hardware sales.

‘They’ve got 10,000 engineers on the road, so in terms of how they engage with their customers, its’ very, very direct,’ said Neil Salt, managing director of Aurora’s IoT division. ‘We’ve always been excited about what the opportunities would be beyond the bulb and the opportunity came along with Hive. They have real opportunity in terms of their scale and the reach into residential. You can’t ignore they’re a significant player in that space. With men on the ground it makes a significant difference in how the adoption curve will be because you have the face-to-face interaction with people.’

The ‘men on the ground’ aren’t selling Hive Active Light per se. But as service and support engineers who install the smart Hive thermostat, they put a human face to the system, and can help warm up users to the notion of adding smart products such as LED lamps. Customers can purchase the Hive-branded, Aurora-supplied bulbs through the Hive website or from a number of UK retailers including John Lewis, Curry’s, Amazon, Maplin and Screwfix. One original, dimmable bulb costs £19, a set of three costs £49, and five costs £79. The bulbs are rated at 806 lumens, nine watts, 25,000 hours and 2700K. Users control them via Apple or Android devices. Signals travel via ZigBee wireless connections.

The new nine-watt ‘cool-to-warm’ colour temperature bulb is priced at £29, £79 and £119 for one, three or five. The bulbs can range from a warm 2700K to a cool 6500K (in the counterintuitive numbers of the Kelvin scale, higher is cooler). Prices for the 9.5-watt full RGB colour bulb are £44, £119 and £179 for quantities of one, three or five.

Hive makes the bulbs available with either of the UK’s standard socket fitting – ‘screw’ or ‘bayonet.’ The bulbs do not require a Hive Active Heating system, but they do require a hub.

The hub is a small square device that looks like a broadband modem. Hive sells a starter kit including one hub and three bulbs for £89, £119 and £159 for the dimmable white, cool-to-warm, and colour bulbs, respectively.

Existing Hive Active Heating users can tie bulbs into their hubs. New users who want heating, lighting and the other Hive products including smart plugs and sensors can buy kits starting at £299 for a hub and heating, one bulb, an indoor motion sensor and either a door or window sensors; £349 includes an extra lamp plus a smart plug.

Customer retention

Although the Hive deal helps cast Aurora as more of a services company, Aurora’s revenues will come strictly from the conventional modus operandi of selling bulbs. Aurora sells them to Hive, which resells them to customers of its energy services.

The alliance with British Gas should help boost Aurora’s push into smart lighting. The Welwyn Garden City, England-based company is a big champion of IoT lighting. CEO Andrew Johnson is also founder and CEO of St. Petersburg, Florida-based IoT lighting start-up Gooee, which makes technology for companies like Aurora to embed in LED bulbs and luminaires. The Hive bulbs do not use Gooee technology, which is currently more geared to the commercial market, and which is not due out until early 2017

For British Gas, if Hive Active Light helps engage customers, it could help offset a decline in its customer base. The company – which claims to be the world’s oldest power utility with roots going back to 1812 – has about 14.5 million accounts, but it has been losing accounts. In the first quarter of this year alone, 224,000 customers bolted to competitors offering incentives for switching suppliers.

While lighting companies morph more into service entities, the Aurora partnership helps turn British Gas – traditionally a services outfit – into one more reliant on hardware sales. That corollary could help offset the monetary hit that utilities stand to take as people increasingly try to conserve energy and become more energy-efficient.

‘They’re in a bit of a dichotomy at the minute as an industry,’ noted Salt. ‘Everyone wants to buy less of what they’re selling – energy. It’s interesting to see when you look globally at energy and utility companies and how they are looking at creating value beyond energy. The lighting industry has its ‘value beyond illumination’ statement. I think every business as a whole, as things get commoditised, as markets change, it’s interesting to see how they adapt. Energy companies are well-placed. They’ve got their reach, they’ve got their scale, they’ve got customer connectivity. I think it’s great if they’re able to offer products in this ‘smart’ space. It can only be good for all of us to create awareness and serve as a catalyst.’

Of course there are other factors that could help rev up the market. Mass market retailer Ikea, for instance, recently said that it plans to launch an affordable smart lighting line by April.

It’s not clear that Hive Active Light has yet turned into a runaway success. Guy declined to say how many users have gone for it, other than noting that “demand has greatly exceed our expectations.” The broader Hive in general has signed up over 360,000 homes since launching as a heating offering in July 2015, and is the UK’s leading smart thermostat brand, according to Guy.

‘The number of people interested in smart home tech is growing all the time,’ he said. ‘We’re definitely reaching a tipping point.’

It’s still early days. If the market for Hive products and services does indeed heat up in lighting, then watch for more hook-ups between utilities and lighting companies like Aurora.

Lux Reports: Retailers are using light as a branding tool. Primark has opted for a bright feel while the opposite approach is popular with retailers such as Hollister and Desigual. Image credit: Primark

Building brands, driving sales, controlling costs, and preserving the all-important ‘look and feel’… who said retail lighting was easy? Here are the eight biggest trends influencing retail lighting in 2015.

1. Energy Saving LED Retrofits:

Retail was one of the first sectors to start dabbling in LED lighting, because of the big energy savings that can be made by replacing electricity-guzzling halogen spotlights. Major retailers are announcing big new rollouts nearly every day: Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Next, Walmart… but it’s still a small minority of stores that have switched to the new technology, and it’s mainly the bigger chains with significant resources and economies of scale behind them. In time, though, it seems inevitable that LED will be everywhere.

OUTLOOK: Loads of shops have already gone LED but there are plenty left – especially the smaller ones.

2. Branding with light:

With stiff competition from online shopping, bricks-and-mortar retailers are having to reinvent their stores as a place where consumers can experience the brands and the product. And they’re learning to use light as one of the most effective ways to become distinctive and recognisable – each in their own way. From Hollister to Primark, light is becoming part of what makes brands what they are.

OUTLOOK: This is a trend the lighting business is well placed to cash in on.

3. New colour technology:

Colour has always been key in retail lighting. Many buyers still assume that going LED means compromising on colour quality; but if you avoid the cheap rubbish, it doesn’t have to be so. Halogen has long been the benchmark for colour quality, but in fact many LED products are now outperforming halogen and the latest colour technologies use specially tuned light to keep whites clean while making certain colours even more vivid

OUTLOOK: LED spent a long time proving its adequacy. Get set for it to start fulfilling its real potential.

4. Lights that do new things:

What if lights could guide you around a shop and send you special offers when you’re looking at particular items? Well, now they can, thanks to super-accurate positioning systems powered by LED lights. It’s done by modulating light in a way the human eye can’t see, but that can be picked up by the cameras in shoppers’ mobile phones. The light from each luminaire carries a unique code, which the phone uses to pinpoint its position. EldoLED is already installing its Lux Award-winning positioning system at retail sites in the US, GE has several trials under way at retail sites in the US and Europe, and Philips is trialling its system at a museum in the Netherlands.

OUTLOOK: We’ve yet to see it in a real-life retail application, but we’re very excited about it.

5. The flight to quality:

We’ve all seen heartbreaking examples of poor-quality LEDs in retail. A well-meaning store manager has tried to save money on energy and maintenance, and now the shop is dim, all the clothes look washed out and the customers feel like zombies. Those days are coming to an end: the wild west of the LED market is being tamed, and even those buyers who had their fingers burned (literally or figuratively) in the early days are trying again, with a renewed focus on look and feel.

OUTLOOK: Some scepticism remains, but LED is winning new friends daily.

6.Overcoming the fear:

Retailers can’t afford to get the look and feel wrong, so LED rollouts tend to be nerve-wracking. There is always a certain risk when you invest in new technology. And with no real standards for LED lighting products, we might just have to embrace that risk. With warranties, funding and improved quality, it’s getting easier, but there’s still inertia – partly the result of bad experiences, uncertainty or mistrust over exaggerated energy-saving and lifetime claims made by manufacturers.

OUTLOOK: Lighting refits are never simple, but more and more people are at it, giving buyers confidence – and it’s getting easier by the day. 7. 

 Justifying the spend:

It’s easy enough to prove the environmental benefits of an LED upgrade, but sadly that’s not always enough to persuade the finance department to approve the upfront expenses associated with a new lighting scheme. Imagine how much easier it would be if you could prove the correlation between better lighting and increased sales. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy to separate the lighting from the myriad of other variables that influence people’s shopping decisions. As Simon Waldron, Sainsbury’s electrical engineering manager, told Lux: ‘The controllability of variables is missing. We need a standardised approach to proving the link between lighting and sales which at the moment can’t be applied.’

For Philips and Siemens the answer has veered toward ‘a,’ most recently with Philips’ announcement this week that it will seek ‘alternative ownership’ for its lighting group, a move that echoes Siemens’ 2013 spin-off of its Osram lighting company.

At GE however they’re taking a new crack at ‘b’ with a quiet corporate restructuring in which CEO Jeff Immelt has fused GE Lighting with a division charged with ‘growth and innovation’ and whose boss, Beth Comstock, also runs the Silicon Valley-based GE Ventures, a firm that invests in startups in software, energy, healthcare and manufacturing.

‘On Monday, Sept. 16 GE announced internally that they will align the Lighting business with GE’s growth and innovation team, led by Beth Comstock,’ GE told Lux in an email. ‘The transition is not effective immediately. It will happen over the next few months.’ The company has yet to publicly announce the change. The move had surfaced in an article in Fortune Magazine, which said Comstock takes the lighting reins on Oct. 1.

 ‘NOT FOR SALE’

It was Comstock who two weeks ago told Lux that GE Lighting is not for sale, denying rumours that if true would put U.S.-based GE in the same category as Holland’s Philips and Germany’s Siemens as traditional large industrial companies moving away from direct involvement in the lighting industry.

As part of the shift, Maryrose Sylvester continues as president and CEO of GE Lighting, but she will report to Comstock. Sylvester had been reporting to Chip Blankenship, who has been president and CEO of GE’s appliance and lighting business unit. Earlier this month GE sold its appliance division – dishwashers, toasters, washing machines and the like – to Sweden’s AB Electrolux for $3.3 billion.

Appliances and lighting had accounted for $8.3 billion in sales at the $146 billion company last year. Lighting was about $3 billion of that GE told Lux this week – until now, GE has not separated out lighting numbers from appliances. Appliances was the latest division to go at GE as the company focuses on high margin industrial goods and services.

Comstock, a rising star at GE who also serves as corporate marketing officer and senior vice president, reports directly to Immelt.

BEEN THERE DONE THAT 

She has solid experience at the type of digital industry convergence that challenges today’s lighting business, which is shifting from conventional incandescent and fluorescent bulbs, to lights based on LEDs – light emitting diodes, or semiconductors – a transition that is opening up the field to new digital only manufacturers and to Internet and consumer technology companies like Google and Apple.

Her background includes several years overseeing digital strategy for media giant NBC Universal as president of integrated media, when broadcasting giants like NBC, CBS and ABC were beginning to cope with the incursion of technology powerhouses like Google and YouTube into their industry (NBC was part of the GE empire at the time; GE sold its remaining 49 percent share to cable TV company Comcast for $16.7 billion in early 2013).

That familiarity could help Comstock navigate GE Lighting around a global market where lighting could underpin everything from smart cities to the connected home, and which will rely on innovations and partnerships with technology and networking firms among others.

All the while, she will have to figure out a way to make money. LED bulbs cost much more to make than conventional bulbs, but startup companies are pushing down end user prices faster than some of the cost-burdened giants can afford. LEDs in principle also last much longer, eradicating any replacement bulb business model.

Thus, GE will have to hone a profitable business out of selling lighting services, controls and connectivity.

NETWORKING

Not only will it have to foster relationships with Internet and networking companies, but it will have to fend off challenges from relatively new lighting companies like Opple, Cree, TCP and Acuity, born in the modern lighting era and not encumbered by a legacy lighting business (GE and Philips have both been a making bulbs for over 120 years).

No wonder, with challenges like this, Philips decided on an ‘alternative ownership’ escape route. Even after an impressive run of innovations that has included the Hue line of bulbs that can change brightness and colours via wireless remote control, Philips is setting into slow motion a plan to find buyers for its lighting division, which it says could take a year or two. (Some industry observers are even whispering about a hookup between Philips and GE. Neither company would comment on that speculation).

Comstock told Fortune that there’s tremendous opportunity to partner with startups that develop LED technology for commercial and government buildings.

She certainly talks the talk.

‘Beth Comstock is passionate about change and innovation,’ reads her bio on GE’s corporate website, not yet updated to relfect her new lighting role. ‘She leads GE’s growth efforts via marketing, sales, licensing and communications and oversees GE Ventures. Her current priorities include partnering with and investing in start-ups, developing new markets in analytics, energy and affordable health through GE’s industrial internet, ecomagination and healthymagination initiatives, and making connections that spur a culture of inventiveness and grow brand value.’

It also notes that she serves on the boards of Nike and of Quirky, ‘an online hub that makes invention accessible.’ Quirky helped GE develop its Link connected bulb.

Looks good on paper. Let the innovations begin. There aren’t many other choices.

Shuttla

www.novelenergylighting.com

Showing current and forecast smart lighting controls growth.

This new analysis examines the key growth strategies of the major lighting companies, including Acuity Brands, Legrand, Lutron and Zumtobel, and it categorises application areas into commercial and industrial, residential, outdoor lighting, public and government buildings and road vehicles. Its geographical reach is North and South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world (RoW).

On the basis of lighting type, the study examines LED, fluorescent, (FL), compact fluorescent (CFL) and high intensity discharge lamps (HID), plus the and related controls, which include relays, controllable breakers, occupancy sensors, dimming actuators, switch actuators, blind/shutter actuators, transmitters and receivers.

The smart lighting industry involves the use of lighting control systems that deliver the right amount and/or quality of light when needed. It can allow lighting to automatically perform various operations at set times or under set conditions.

Smart lighting also makes use of intelligent lighting control systems to intelligently control light, based on various parameters including occupancy, movement, colour temperature, amount of natural/daylight and so on. These are the main topics of the new study.

The growth of the market in coming years is expected to be very important, with the revenue growth estimated to reach £33 billion by 2020, at an estimated CAGR of 15.8% from 2014 to 2020. In addition to the major players mentioned, there have been a number of acquisitions, mergers, new product launches, agreements etc., and these are also discussed in the report.

The importance of LEDs

Europe currently has the largest market for smart lighting, especially in commercial and industrial, public and government buildings applications, with the Asia Pacific region second, the report finds. Several new players have emerged in the latter region, which ‘have developed breakthrough products related to smart lighting’. The market is also expected to grow at a modest rate in the developed regions, such as the Americas, according to this analysis.

Wireless is changing the market

 In addition, the report observes that LED based lighting devices, integrated with the various wireless technologies, are finding good opportunities. Wireless networking technologies, it says, are bringing intelligence to a new generation of smart lighting.