How do you square the circle? You have a growing population, a slew of new electricity-guzzling multimedia gadgets like digital videos and plasma TVs, but for political, economic, and environmental reasons, you cannot build new power stations to service any significant increase in demand. So what do you do? If you are the state government of California, you pass laws. Via various carrots—such as rebates—and sticks—such as fines—they encourage citizens to do the right thing, energy-wise. The system works, wonderfully well: California's electricity usage is the lowest in the nation, by a considerable margin.1 Amazingly, per-capita consumption in California is not growing; unlike in the rest of the United States, it is fairly flat. That is why other states look to California for their lead in setting energy efficiency standards.
But as California's population continues to inexorably increase, as people find ever-new ways to consume energy, and as generating capacity remains capped, the state's regulatory body—the California Energy Commission—and its electric utilities must continually seek new ways to reduce consumption. The alternatives are unacceptable. You can spend a fortune to buy surplus hydropower at prime rates from the Pacific Northwestern states of Oregon and Washington. Or, worse, impose rolling blackouts because you cannot provide enough power, as happened during the California electricity crisis of 2000–2001, one of the most dramatic crises ever to afflict the state. “Blackout” means just what it says: the thing people hate most about power outages is that the lights go out.
Since lighting accounts for around a quarter of electricity usage, California has expended much effort attempting to get homeowners to switch from highly inefficient light sources like incandescents to more frugal forms of illumination. In October 2005 the state radically updated its code of regulations that mandate energy efficiency in residential buildings. Known as Title 24, the code already stipulated that “high efficacy” light sources must be used for, for example, 50 percent of lighting in kitchens and bathrooms. Now, the revision requires that the remaining parts of the house must also have high-efficacy forms of lighting. In many cases, that effectively means that the first light you turn on in your home must be a fluorescent. Or, more precisely, a compact fluorescent lamp.
CFLs are scaled-down U-shaped tubes grafted onto an Edison socket. Since their introduction in 1979, they have gradually gained acceptance. There is a lot to be said in their favor. Compact fluorescent lamps use up to 75 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs and last approximately ten times longer. Many of the problems traditionally associated with fluorescent lighting have been overcome. These included the characteristic delayed start and flickering as the lamp's ballast kicks in with the high voltage needed to initiate the gas discharge, the principle on which fluorescents work. Also, during operation, that all-too-familiar irritating hum or buzzing noise. Substituting electronic for magnetic ballasts took care of those.
But for all the lamp's advantages, most people have never learned to love compact fluorescents. For one thing, CFLs are expensive—about eight times the price of an incandescent bulb, three times as much as a halogen. Reducing the cost should be a simple matter of market forces and economies of scale. In the case of California, however, Title 24 has guaranteed the market for compact fluorescents. Manufacturers know this, and consequently are in no hurry to lower their prices.
For another, there is the ugly quality of the light that most CFLs produce, which many people find either too white or too blue. It is harsh—“eerie,” some call it—unlike the warm yellow glow put out by an incandescent. You didn't get a true-color read from compact fluorescents, which meant that that nice granite countertop you splurged five thousand dollars on to upgrade your kitchen with looked a completely different color at night. Worse, they made people's skin look unhealthy. With their newer models lamp makers had fixed many of the color rendering issues, but negative perceptions persisted. As a result, only 6 percent of households use CFLs today.
A more intractable problem is that you can't dim compact fluorescent lamps. Turning down power to a CFL reduces the ability of its filament to emit electrons, with the result that it rapidly degrades. But not everybody was aware of this. What often happened was that buyers would move into a new home equipped with bright 26-watt fluorescents. After a week of living under harsh, stadium-grade lighting, they would dash off to Home Depot, buy a dimmer, hook it up, and blow the lights. Then they would call their builder and ask for replacements. This added time, labor, and cost. But for the builder there was also an additional issue. In getting rid of the unwanted fluorescents, builders now have to comply with another recent California law, Title 22, introduced in February 2006, which covers the disposal of hazardous waste.
Fluorescents contain mercury. Indeed, fluorescent tubes were originally known as “mercury vapor lamps.” Mercury is an extremely dangerous substance, especially if it gets into the water supply or the food chain. Recent studies have linked mercury to autism in children and Alzheimer's in adults. There is controversy over this, but there can be no doubt that severe mercury poisoning does cause birth defects and paralysis. In Japan during the 1950s and 1960s, over nine hundred people died and almost three thousand were stricken as the result of eating fish containing harmful levels of mercury from Minamata Bay. Unfortunately for them, the bay happened to be where a local chemical company was dumping its contaminated wastes. Today, inevitably, many people fear exposure to mercury pollution.2
Home builders in California now need a permit to transport fluorescent lights. If the lamps break, they are required by law to dispose of them properly and risk a jail sentence if they fail to do so. For all of the above reasons, builders are not especially keen on fluorescent lighting. But obliged to comply with Title 24, what choice do they have? In fact, the code does not insist on CFLs. Any high-efficacy source that can meet the numbers it stipulates will do. And, as Dean Barnes, a builder of custom homes in Southern California discovered to his delight, an alternative light source had recently become available. Barnes would become one of the first builders in the world to enthusiastically embrace solid-state lighting.
Dean Barnes describes himself as a maverick. He has been on job sites more or less his whole life. He grew up in Seattle where his father was a general contractor, moving down to Southern California in 1970 when he was thirteen. Himself a licensed general contractor, Barnes has worked for the past nine years for Brookfield Southland. This is a semi-independent branch of Brookfield, one of the top twenty largest home builders in North America.3 Barnes's outfit operates mostly in Orange County and Inland Empire, as the southeastern end of Greater Los Angeles is popularly known.
“We're a production builder in the semi-custom market, we run around 450 units a year. Our average sales price is probably in the low eights right now. We start in the low fives then go up to two million dollars. We don't get a lot of first-time buyers; our typical buyers are move-ups. They know what it's like to own a house, they know all the changes they'd like to make from what they're living in now. We tend to allow our buyers to make minor changes if it doesn't mess up the schedule too bad. We try to accommodate them, keep everyone happy.
“My role is to specify material for option products. I investigate new technology home-building items, then massage them into packages that we can exhibit to buyers. I push a lot of new product into our option line, to make things available for homeowners. If it's kind of cutting-edge, Brookfield likes to be able to say that we offered it to the public first.” One example of an option that Barnes had pioneered at Brookfield was “structured wiring,” bundling all the TV and Internet cabling together in preparation for Internet usage throughout the home.
“Because of my custom side, I'm used to having people ask me, Why can't we do something cool? And that's kind of where this LED picture came to life.” For homeowners, lighting is not a particularly big deal; it's something most of them take for granted. From a builder's point of view, the goal is to make home lighting feel natural, not draw attention to itself by not fitting in architecturally. At the builder expositions he attended, Barnes had seen numerous LED offerings, under-cabinet lighting, step lighting, accessory sort of things, but as yet none of the makers had attempted to accommodate fixture design into their products. “At the time I felt kind of locked in to fluorescent lighting, but it was something that everyone else was doing, and I didn't think that it was the most attractive form of light. I wanted to get into LEDs, which are smaller, they can be molded into something more pleasing to the eye, so we're using a smaller source but getting better light from it.”
His chance came when, in mid-2005, Barnes was invited to a lunch-and-learn session at the offices of a small maker of LED signs and step lights called Permlight, located in nearby Tustin. There he met the company's CEO, Manuel Lynch. “I got together with him and I said, OK, you've got all these little LED modules that you use on your commercial signs—What if you redistributed them within a different case and offered them from a home buyer's perspective, would that be feasible? Then Manuel said those magic words that builders want to hear: We can do that for you.”
He made a lasting impression on people, this Manuel Lynch. He was in his late thirties, over six feet tall, solidly built, with cropped dark-brown gray-flecked hair and a neatly trimmed mustache and chin beard. He evinced a determined, self-confident air. “Manuel's always got a smile on his face, and when you talk to him, he's got that excitement in his voice,” Dean Barnes said. “He knows that he's on the cutting edge and he loves being there.”
Deducing the origins of someone with a name like Manuel Lynch is not that difficult. His mother is from Spain, taught Spanish when she first arrived in the United States, later becoming a federal court interpreter. Manuel grew up in Southern California but spent his summer vacations in Spain and, like his siblings, is a fluent speaker of Spanish. His father is New York Irish, an engineer who spent his entire career at McDonnell Douglas, retiring as the company's head of aerodynamics. The motorcycles Manuel rides reflect his bi-continental background, an American V-Rod Harley and a European Vespa scooter.
Lynch entered the high-tech arena from an unlikely direction. At the University of Dallas, he majored in theater lighting. On graduating, he realized belatedly that, at least early in their careers, theater people tend to spend most of their time doing pick-up jobs like waiting tables. “I realized that I wasn't a really good waiter, so I decided to go into the semiconductor industry, because my brother was working there.” It was while putting together a multimedia promotional video for his brother's company, Solid State Devices, that Manuel discovered his true vocation—marketing. But his theater degree courses had taught him one important lesson: “When you do a Shakespeare play that's based back in the 1500s, and you have to modernize it for the present day, you have to understand the history: What happened in the politics of the time, the economics of the time, what was the popular art like, what was the dress like? So any time I get involved in anything, I study it down to the tiniest detail. I find all the right people to help me understand it the best I can. I'm a quick study—I can study any new technology and get involved in it overnight. That's just my mindset, that's what I do.”
From Solid State Devices, Manuel moved on to Microsemi, a Santa Ana-based chipmaker where he headed up business development. There, he was faced with the challenge of finding a common goal that would unite twenty disparate business units. The market he chose to address was electronic components for implantable medical devices like pacemakers. To learn more about this business, he identified every pacemaker company in the industry and asked them what they needed. The strategy paid off: the company increased the number of implantable components it made from two to seventeen. “My claim to fame is that I have seventeen products in Dick Cheney's heart,” he joked. During his time at Microsemi, the company's stock soared from eight dollars to a high of eighty-five dollars a share.
Lynch first became interested in LEDs at Microsemi, identifying potential markets that could be pursued. The company was strong in thermal management technologies. Applied to light emitting diodes, this ability to prevent chips overheating internally meant that the devices could be driven harder. The initial target was brighter blue and white backlights for mobile applications such as cell phones and personal digital assistants. In early 2002, after a management shake-up, Lynch left Microsemi. Still aggressively pursuing LED applications, he began consulting for Permlight, which he joined as CEO in late 2002 when the company's founder retired.
Permlight was founded in 1995 by an engineer named Ben George. His goal was to replace incandescents with LEDs in the lights that are embedded in the floors of cinemas to prevent patrons tripping and falling. The company was successful, but the market was tiny. Permlight's engineers subsequently came up with the idea of adapting an LED product they had developed for theater seat lighting to replace neon in “channel letters.” These make up the large illuminated signs you see on the outsides of commercial premises. They typically depict the corporate logo.
Permlight filed a unique patent that was based on the notion that mounting LEDs directly on the metal of the signs would be a wonderful way of dissipating heat. The big letters would function as massive heat sinks for the tiny lights. As with Microsemi's thermal management technologies, the advantage here was that you could run the LEDs using more than their rated current, making them shine brighter without hurting the chips. This ability is crucial because it allows Permlight to offer the most cost-effective products in the marketplace, since they use fewer LEDs than their competitors to achieve the same light output.
When Manuel Lynch arrived at Permlight, it was a stodgy old-style family business whose principals seemed more interested in playing golf than in making sales. There was talk of selling their technology to a Chinese company. The arrival of the dynamic young CEO—Lynch was then just thirty-five—soon put a stop to that. Within a couple of years he had completely restructured the company, reducing sales as a percentage of goods sold and doubling gross margins. To fund development, he tapped wealthy individual angel investors. Based on his previous track record, they were prepared to bet on the small, privately held company.
Lynch hired a team of like-minded individuals to pursue markets aggressively. The first was channel letters. By 2005 LEDs had replaced neon in almost two-thirds of applications. Permlight is the world leader in white lighting for solid-state signage, shipping miles of product every month. Customers include Ford, Sprint, and Chase Bank. Next, following the introduction by Nichia of powerful white LEDs that shone with a warm, incandescent-like light that worked well for natural skin tones, Permlight introduced a series of new products targeting the new-home market.
Lynch approached this market with typical thoroughness. He was determined to learn the builders’ language, to crack their code of secret handshakes, to find out which golf tournaments to line up for, what the rebate programs for electricians were—whatever it took to get into residential applications. Accordingly, he had a list made of the 184 home building offices in California that purchased lighting products. He invited their buyers to a lunch-and-learn at Permlight's offices. “Dean Barnes was one of the people that came by, he asked tons of questions, and eventually he became a rock-solid customer. He's not by any stretch of the imagination a large customer, but he was one of those invaluable customers we identify who understands the trade, and the applications. He taught us about the dynamics of the way the business works, about who the distributors in the marketplace are, about the different trim sizes.”4
Following that initial meeting, the two men spent so much time together that it seemed to Dean that he and Manuel were like old school buddies. “Manuel didn't know from a builder's point of view what he was up against,” Barnes said. “I thought LED technology was a cool thing, a neat direction to go in, something that could be energy-efficient. If we got it designed in the right way from the start, redesigned the structure so that it was strictly a residential product, we could make it cost-effective as well.”
Lynch took Barnes's advice. “What we've done is modularized our technology such that we have three basic systems that can fit pretty much any type of light source that's out there. They can be incorporated into every single fixture that goes into a house, whether it's a recessed can, an under-cabinet light, a pendant, a step light, an exterior lantern, or a closet light.” Crucially, Permlight developed fixtures that were easy to install, with no messing around converting AC to DC. “A huge deal that nobody ever figured out is, Can electricians install these lights and not charge a premium?” Lynch said. “We developed systems that install just like fluorescents, and run on line voltage.”
One good thing about LEDs was that, unlike fluorescents, you could dim them. Amazingly enough, as you dimmed them, their energy efficiency actually increased, so you got more lumens per watt. From a home builder's point of view, there was also another, less obvious attraction in switching from incandescents to LEDs. That is, the 80-percent reduction in electric power requirements for lighting means that builders can reduce the amount of copper cable they have to run. This is particularly beneficial in high-rise complexes that contain dozens of apartments, where the amount of copper cable is accordingly long.
For Barnes, however, getting approval from his management at Brookfield Southland to install Permlight fixtures was an uphill struggle. LEDs were new and unfamiliar and, in terms of initial cost, they were very expensive. “A builder's purchasing department is pretty much stuck on the bottom line,” Barnes explained. “Their objective is to get something as cheaply as you can. When you tell them, This is a better product even though it's going to cost us more money, they don't necessarily welcome you with open arms. Because they can do the same for less, even though it may not look as pretty. Management doesn't consider LED lighting cost effective for the business plan, so I have to force it along.
“In terms of cost, you're looking at about fifteen dollars for a standard incandescent can trim. The going rate for Manuel's LED trim is about forty-five or fifty dollars. From a home builder's point of view, a 300 percent markup does not work on a one-to-one basis. So now you've got to start looking at it from an energy-efficient point of view, and playing on that marketing aspect of it. You go to a homeowner and say, You know what? If you buy this upgrade and put LEDs into your standard cans, which we have the ability to do, now you don't have to change a lightbulb for ten or twelve years. When you start figuring that you're going to pay a dollar for a lightbulb, and you're going to change it every six or eight months, you play that out over ten or twelve years, and the LED will pretty much pay for itself. In addition to which, when you get into the nuts and bolts of your utility bill, there are some savings there, it just takes a while to gain them.” Predictably, Lynch was more upbeat. He estimated that the cost of upgrading to LEDs for an average US home, which uses fifteen to twenty recessed can lights, would be about $750. He claimed that the lights would pay for themselves in terms of savings on utility bills in eight to nine months.
The first homes Brookfield Southland equipped with significant numbers of LED lights were in Irvine, at a housing project named Treo. The challenge for Brookfield had been how to make its homes stand out from those of other builders. “Everything had to be different from the competition,” a corporate marketing person said, “but it's differences by degree, not paradigm shifts. It's really about identifying a smaller niche of the market that demands more and is willing to pay for it.”
At the time of this writing, Brookfield Southland had equipped around thirty homes in five different projects with Permlight fixtures. “We use them for under-counter lighting, for recessed can trims, a lot of artwork and bookcase illumination, hallway lighting, and lighting that is going to be on most of the time,” Barnes said. Initial customer response was favorable. “Buyers like the look of it, it's got a nice clean look. From a decorator standpoint, going to LEDs for under-counter lights and being able to dim those lights in a kitchen or bar area means that you can create moods you can't do with fluorescents, and that's a big draw for those houses.” Following this successful proof-of-concept stage, the company planned to incorporate LEDs into its standard specifications for all new homes.
Dean Barnes enjoyed being in the vanguard of the lighting revolution. For him, it was a new adventure: “Usually you go to the local building materials supply house, you buy what they offer, and that's what you have to use. To be able to have an outlet where you can go to somebody and say, Hey, what if we did this? Y'know, it's been an exciting time for me, working with Manuel, trying to be in the forefront of things, to be a leader not a follower.”
Before going the whole hog and equipping entire homes with solid-state lighting, however, Barnes was looking forward to LEDs receiving an explicit endorsement from the California Energy Commission. This would take the form of a further update to Title 24, due in 2008, that would specifically list solid-state lighting as an acceptable high-efficacy source. “That's going to make a wide avenue for us to go down and say, OK, we're going to get rid of fluorescents, which are ugly and don't produce a good light, and change to LED trims throughout the house. Once the California Energy Commission officially announces that LEDs are as good as fluorescent lighting, it's going to open up a marketing opportunity for LED manufacturers and anybody that has the ability to design fixtures. I think that in 2008, this is going to explode on the market.”
Already ten or fifteen high-end home builders in California were following Brookfield's lead. Manuel Lynch was confident that a precedent had been set on which other builders throughout the United States would quickly pick up. In May 2006 Permlight began offering recessed LED cans that complied with the high-efficacy requirements of Title 24. “We can confidently state that at least 50 percent of the top home builders in the USA will be using these products in new homes as the primary light source by the end of 2006,” the irrepressible Lynch predicted. That year Permlight had thirty-two employees and sales of over $15 million. The company is growing at a rate of between 200 and 300 percent a year.
Most of the buyers would not come knocking on Permlight's door. Builders would buy direct from lighting fixture makers or from home building supply stores. Like Brent York of TIR Systems, Lynch had quickly recognized that “the general lighting market was very archaic, very old school. We thought if these companies were going to try and take LEDs and merge them into their world, they were going be really confused. They needed a partner that knew how to merge those LEDs into conventional lighting systems. That's what Permlight has become, an enabling engine for those companies.”
In March 2006 Permlight announced the signing of an agreement with Progress Lighting. This Spartanburg, South Carolina–based firm is the leading supplier of residential lighting in North America, with almost a third of the market. Two months later, the partners announced the launch of more than fifty solid-state lighting fixtures. To augment the direct channel, Progress planned to sell a range of Permlight-based LED lighting products via one of their largest customers, Home Depot.
When would the residential market for LED lighting take off? Lynch was bullish in his predictions. “I look at the market, there's 1.2 million homes built in the US per year, and the average home uses 15 to 20 cans per house. Let's say we've got a potential of 22 million cans. Progress Lighting has a 30 percent market share, so let's take that down to 6.5 million. Let's assume that a good year would be half of 1 percent for them, switching over to LEDs. That's going to be 5,000 cans in the first year. That's a lot of dollars, and that's just for one part type, it doesn't include the step lights, or the under-counter lights. We looked at that, and asked, Is half of 1 percent realistic? And the head guy at Progress said, If we don't do 10 percent conversion in the first year, we're doing a bad job. So now we're going to be doing closer to 600,000 cans at 9 LEDs per, we'll need 5.4 million high-output white LEDs—that's a lot of sales. At $50 for an average per can—that's a lot of business.
“That's why we're starting to see it happen. If we reach 10 percent by year two—2007—we think that will be reasonable. We'll probably do around 5,000 to 10,000 with Progress Lighting of 10 different can types, for a total of 50,000 cans. In year two, we would expect those sales to go up pretty dramatically, as a result of Home Depot, which is our largest customer, to a market share of 20 to 25 percent. By 2008, when the rewritten Title 24 lighting standards come out, we expect that the states of Texas, Florida, Wisconsin, and New York will have adopted similar energy codes. We think the market share for LEDs in new construction could potentially grow to 50 to 60 percent by the year 2008.”
Overoptimistic? Probably, but even if only a fraction of Lynch's predictions come true, they would still represent a giant leap for solid-state lighting. At the 2006 LightFair trade show held in Las Vegas in June 2006, Lynch said he was “overwhelmed” by the level of interest in Permlight's products. “Every major lighting company in the world dropped by to take a look at what our systems were and to discuss how we could integrate our lighting into theirs. They're actively pursuing us to do the same thing that we're doing with Progress.” Many of these potential customers had been directed to Permlight from the Nichia booth. The relationship between the two companies was, Lynch liked to think, synergistic. “Nichia says that when they come to California, they visit Apple and Permlight, because Apple is the business for today [Nichia makes the LEDs for iPod backlights] and we are the business for tomorrow.”
I was curious to know what motivates an entrepreneur like Manuel Lynch. “It's not about money,” he insisted, “that's such a wrong focus. My whole life, anytime I decided to get involved in anything, it was like I grabbed a really big sword, I was going to fight any beast that was in the way, and I was going to win. It's about winning: when I chose a battle that I want to win, I'm not going to lose. That's what it comes down to, winning and winning and winning.”
Winning is not merely a matter of personal satisfaction, though. “This is about winning major energy savings in the United States. I often get into trouble because in the presentations I give, I point out that it takes forty-two barrels of oil a year to light someone's home today with incandescent lighting. If you do it with LED lighting, it would take eight barrels. Nobody really understands that we can solve our national security issues and dependency on oil by saving energy. Gary Flamm, the head of the California Energy Commission, told me that if all homes in California were built today with incandescent lights, the lights wouldn't turn on. And that's been my big push—let's go conserve energy, we don't have to wait, let's do it today.”
Lynch positively relishes the challenge. “I was at a lighting conference where a representative from one of the chip makers got up and said, LEDs are not going to be in people's homes until 2015. And I thought to myself, That's crazy. I'm the type of guy, if somebody tells me it can't be done, that's the first thing I'm going to do.”
“Manuel's like a freight train,” laughed Michael Siminovitch, “but it's zealots like him that make stuff happen. We desperately need to have these kinds of guys around.”
Siminovitch heads the California Lighting Technology Center, a unique organization whose charter is to promote the application of energy-efficient lighting and to help innovative energy-saving technologies make the transition from laboratory to marketplace. CLTC is based at the University of California at Davis. This is a strategic location that is far enough away from the Bay Area and Los Angeles to be seen as independent, but close enough to the seat of government in Sacramento to influence the formulation of state energy policies. Established in 2004, the center works with its sponsors, the California Energy Commission, the state's utilities, and the electrical fixtures and components manufacturing industry.
CLTC musters a staff that includes specialists in electronics, optics, thermal management, solid-state lighting, and design. Its activities include doing research and demonstrating the technologies they develop for state buildings. The center also has teaching courses, for example, for builders who need guidance on how to meet the state's new energy codes and how to implement solid-state lighting. It also tests new products like Permlight's recessed cans, to see whether they meet Title 24 conditions for efficacy. In January 2006 Permlight joined the CLTC as an affiliate member. The company sponsors a class for students in the design of next-generation home lighting systems based on LEDs.
As an undergraduate, Siminovitch studied engineering in his native Canada (he hails from Ottawa). From there, he did a master's degree in industrial design at the University of Illinois. This was in the late 1970s, during the Carter administration, when the oil crises had made energy efficiency a hot topic. He met an engineering professor who was working on some early Department of Energy lighting standards. The idea that lighting could be a combination of science and art fascinated Siminovitch. It was a rich area, one where there was a lot to be done and where it was possible for an individual to make a difference.
From Illinois, he moved down to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. There, in 1997, Siminovitch made a splash by designing an energy-efficient, compact fluorescent torchiere fixture to replace 300-watt halogen torchieres. These had not only been responsible for a huge increase in residential electricity use, they had also caused numerous fires, notably in college dorms (where the lights were especially popular, students not having to pay the energy bills). Though the torchiere was a success with fixture makers and utilities, it was not the sort of thing that a national laboratory, whose focus has traditionally been on basic science and academic output, was comfortable with. For his part, Siminovitch was much happier filing patents than writing papers.
“What makes Michael different than any other scientist is that he figured out that, in order to be successful, he needed to get products out into the marketplace quickly,” Manuel Lynch noted approvingly. “He's more of a real-world guy.” Siminovitch was also, Lynch thought, the number-one authority on solid-state lighting in California. “He's got a really good sense of what's going to happen with LEDs, and how they're going to take off over the next couple of years.”
I asked Siminovitch to give me his vision of the future of solid-state lighting, and its significance in the energy-efficient scheme of things. He began his answer with a caveat. “LEDs are important, but they're only going to be one of the arrows in the quiver.” Improving the efficacy of lighting sources was only part of the solution. The other parts relied not so much on technology but on smarts, of which remarkably few have thus far been applied to lighting. For most people, lighting is an afterthought, not a principle concern. As a result, few homes and offices are lit as well as they might be.
Another arrow is control systems. “We've shown numerous times that simple lighting control systems are probably the single biggest opportunity for energy savings in this country.” For example, a simple bathroom lighting system that Siminovitch and his team developed at UC Davis in conjunction with a local utility and two manufacturers. The system consists of a compact fluorescent light, which is triggered by a motion sensor, and an LED night-light. When the bathroom light is accidentally left on, and there has been no motion in the room for a given time, the main light turns off, leaving the backup LED light on. The night-light glows sufficiently brightly for residents to avoid tripping or walking into doors. The system is estimated to be 50 percent more efficient than standard bathroom lighting. It is expected to provide substantial energy savings, especially in hotels.
The LED revolution would happen, Siminovitch thought, in two ways. “One is an evolutionary process, through cannibalistic opportunities. That is, we take something out and put something else back in, an LED fixture that does a better job than what it's replacing. A good example of that is Manuel's business—he's doing pendants and downlights, consumer-grade products where the conventional lights are all 17 lumens per watt or less, and he's replacing those with 40-lumens-per-watt LEDs that last a lot longer. So it's a cannibalistic opportunity where you get some incremental benefit—higher efficiency, longer life, no mercury—but the fundamental job has not changed, you're essentially providing it as a downlight, something you recognize as a downlight.
“The cannibalistic opportunities are going to be great—anyplace where we've got an incandescent light source today, we're going to see an LED tomorrow. Incandescent sources are used predominantly in residential applications, so homes are a huge opportunity. Incandescents are also used in major amounts in merchandising, where people want tight beam control or spotlighting. So in terms of displacing load, eliminating mercury, reducing maintenance, all those nice things that really make a difference, the societal benefit is going to be tremendous.
“In addition, I think there's going to be a whole other area that's coming up, of revolutionary change, where we actually start doing new things in lighting because we've got this new technology. Things like spectral change, in which the colors change as a function of the time of day, or in terms of mood, or application. We know that very high color temperatures create certain levels of vision, and low color temperatures create certain levels of comfort. We have the ability now to do that dynamically, with control systems that were previously very expensive or very impractical to do with traditional light sources.
“The manner in which we light is very much driven by our technology. If you look at light sources, they have not changed that much. We've got an incandescent source which is relatively old and a fluorescent source which is relatively new, but the way we apply them is very primitive, we haven't even touched on it. So with the availability of electronic light sources, the capability of making both spatial and spectral chances relatively easily is going to open up new horizons. Coming down the road, it's going to be all the things we're going to see from LEDs that offer new ways of doing things, not just displacing what we've done before.”
Somewhat to his own surprise, Siminovitch has himself recently become a user of solid-state lighting. “I'm putting LED downlights in my kitchen, because in my opinion, the technology has arrived and now it's only going to get better. I like the performance, I mean, at 40 lumens per watt, it's cost-comparable to traditional downlights, it doesn't cost appreciably more than the energy-efficient alternatives, I like the color, it's better looking than fluorescents, it looks like incandescents, and it has a lot of interesting control features. So I think the revolution is happening now.”
Siminovitch is what diffusion-of-innovation theorists call an early adopter. If the number-one lighting authority in California, the number-one state in energy efficiency, is implementing LED fixtures in his own home, it will surely not be long before the rest of us—pragmatists, conservatives, even skeptics—follow suit. The solid-state revolution in lighting has begun. The circle has been squared.
1. 6,800 kilowatt-hours versus 12,800 kilowatt-hours for the US overall.
2. Compact fluorescent lamps contain only trace amounts of mercury, not large enough to pose a threat to householders, but sufficient to make their disposal at landfills and incinerators a concern. Ironically, fluorescent lamps can actually be seen as one of the best mechanisms for reducing the amount of mercury that enters the environment. The largest source of mercury pollution is coal, which naturally contains mercury. When coal is burned, as at coal-fired power plants, mercury is released into the atmosphere. Thus, switching from incandescents to an energy-efficient technology like compact fluorescent lamps reduces the amount of electricity required, hence coal burned and mercury released.
3. The company is headquartered in Toronto.
4. Though technically “trim” is just the visible part of a fixture, in builder's jargon, the terms “trim,” “can,” “can trim,” or “recessed can” are used interchangeably to mean a ceiling-embedded lighting fixture.