Green Energy Revolution Spurs More LED Applications & Companies into Market

The green energy revolution has been spurring the development of innovative applications that enable businesses to reduce their utility costs and carbon footprint, while offering enhanced performance attributes.

Digital Lumens, a Boston, MA-based company, announced in March the availability of a highly innovative Intelligent Lighting System, combining LEDs, networking and software to reduce lighting-related energy consumption by up to 90 percent in warehouses and industrial facilities in order to reduce costs, improve light delivery and meet sustainability targets. The solution includes LED-based fixtures, on-board computing, sensing and built-in intelligence.

Collectively, the fixtures form a Smart Light Grid, which is a lighting network with system-wide intelligence and integrated controls that deliver energy-efficiency results that outperform the capabilities of single "dumb" fixtures. This intelligent control system enables all fixtures in the system to be interlocked electronically, respond to a neighboring fixture's state and/or system-wide programming, and provides real-time usage and occupancy data to the Light Rules management system.

In specific, the Intelligent Lighting System is designed for direct replacements of 400W HID, HPS and T5 or T8 fluorescent fixtures with white-light LED-based luminaires that provide adjustable light levels, while minimizing power consumption. Digital Lumens' Intelligent Lighting Engine was a "Recognized Winner" in the Industrial Category of the 2009 Next Generation Luminaires competition sponsored by the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America, the International Association of Lighting Designers and the U.S. Department of Energy to advance solid-state lighting technology and adoption.

LED solid-state lighting applications and products are truly increasing at a rapid pace at the expense of conventional lighting. As a result, Toshiba Corporation and Toshiba Lighting and Technology Corporation, recently discontinued the production of general-use incandescent bulbs, a product that Toshiba was the first to manufacture in Japan and that it produced for 120 years. Toshiba decided to focus on more energy-efficient lighting in 2008; since then, it has been shifting towards new lighting products such as high-brightness LEDs. The end of their incandescent bulb production was accelerated by a year in advance of the original date, and Toshiba states that this decision will lead to a reduction of 430,000 tons of carbon dioxide when compared to their incandescent bulb production line, assuming a CO2 emission coefficient of 0.39kg/kWh.

Similar to how solar applications attracted many microchip companies in recent years, LEDs have been garnering more attention from corporate giants in the field such as: Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., and United Microelectronics Corp., whom are hoping to compete in a market dominated by Cree Research, General Electric, Nichia, Philips and Osram. The entry of these large-scale manufacturing titans is spurring equipment and materials companies to develop new tools and yield-enhancement processes with the capability of advanced integrated circuit process systems. Besides the general energy-efficient lighting applications, which is a significantly smaller portion of the overall LED market, demand for LEDs used in backlighting for televisions, monitors and other systems is expected to double year-to-year until at least 2012, according to Gartner industry analysts.

"Photo credit- www.trendsupdate.com: LED solid-state lighting in industrial setting."