Lighting a New Path
Richard Scott gives an overview of low energy lighting market and looks at the development of a booming industry.
For a while it seemed the concept of energy conservation was, at best, something wheeled out by slightly eccentric, ageing hippies, powering their bizarre Tellytubbies-style homes with a range of Heath Robinson contraptions. Now figures who would have been held up by newspapers as oddballs 15 or 20 years ago are viewed as thought-leaders and enjoy photo opportunities with local politicians.
The drive to reduce energy consumption is now considered a duty by nearly all companies, with MDs and CEOs regularly issuing details of their company’s latest CO2-cutting venture. Whether the impetus is commercial or genuinely environmentally conscious matters little with 99.9% of scientific opinion suggesting CO2 emissions are one of the primary contributors to a potential environmental catastrophe.
However, with pressure and a crisis often comes innovation and manufacturers of electrical equipment have been forced to come up with new ideas on how their products can be modified to consume lower levels of energy and, in turn, benefit the planet.
Nowhere has this been more visible than in the lighting industry, and with good reason. In Europe, lighting accounts for 14% of all electricity consumption (worldwide the figure is 19%) and in 2005 2 billion incandescent bulbs were sold; an enormous quantity of inefficient, short-lived lamps.
These figures are important because they represent the quickest route to reduced energy consumption. With populations increasing steadily and an ever-expanding range of household electrical equipment now considered standard, the equipment we use to light our homes and businesses is the most simply altered.
By switching to energy saving bulbs such as compact fluorescent lamps, the energy consumed by lighting can be reduced by 80%. Such a substantial and easily achieved impact on consumption has resulted in government and retailers agreeing a voluntary measure to phase out incandescent bulbs in favour of CFLs by 2011, saving 5 million tonnes of CO2 per year.
The Irish government have recently announced they are to outlaw inefficient bulbs even earlier, by the beginning of 2009. This move may put pressure on the UK to strengthen its position and change the voluntary initiative to a mandatory one.
The technology for CFLs has been around since the early 1970s, when an American engineer came up with a design in response to the oil crisis. Although the design failed to make it into production, the concept was taken up and developed by others who saw the potential and gradually it was refined to a viable product by the early 1980s.
Initial CFLs suffered from flickering and slow starting, often taking up to 5 or 10 minutes to reach optimum light output. The flicker problem was solved by replacing magnetic ballasts with an electronic system, which has also improved much of the slow starting. Modern CFLs are far more versatile than their ancestors, and can now be used with dimmer switches, but there is still doubt concerning the quality of light produced. Despite claims that modern CFLs can now emit a wider range of tones and with it greater warmth to the light, the general public remains unconvinced.
Perhaps the main competition for CFL’s position of standard bearer for energy efficient lighting comes from LEDs. This is another technology to have seen significant improvements over recent years, increasing its already considerable efficiency and making advances towards a more comfortable quality of light. While they are still someway short of being commonplace devices for lighting homes or workplaces, their popularity is increasing in a growing number of applications.
The advantages of LEDs over other forms of lighting are numerous:
Unlike CFLs or incandescent bulbs do not break if dropped.
LEDs have a lifespan far in excess of CFLs and incandescent bulbs. LEDs fail after approximately 100,000 hours. CFLs after 15,000 hours, and incandescent light bulbs afer 1,000 hours.
LEDs can produce around 130 lumens per watt, compared with 10 for incandescent bulbs and 70 for CFLs.
LEDs can produce a range of colours without the need for filtering.
The technology is not without a few disadvantages, however. The cost of LEDs, although decreasing, is still higher than other forms of lighting, though this can obviously be recouped through operating costs. More importantly, LEDs are more sensitive to the ambient temperature of the space they are being operated in. In high ambient temperatures, they are prone to overheating, which does reduce their range of applications. Also, there have been concerns raised about the possibility of retinal damage from the use of blue and white LEDs (Blue Light Hazard).
Another area where energy consumption from lighting can be reduced is through lighting control and automation systems, particularly in large offices. The fact is that large areas of buildings are continually lit when no people are present, which amounts to a significant waste of energy. PIR (Passive Infra Red) occupancy sensors offer a solution to this problem, ridding buildings of wasteful lighting and negating the need for people to remember how to switch off lights.
Like much of the technology associated with energy conservation, these systems have improved their effectiveness over the past few years and can now be used to operate HVAC systems as well as lighting. PIR sensitivity has also improved to the extent that the slightest movement is detected, so lights will not switch off if a person in an office chooses not to leave their chair for 20 minutes.
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