ENVIRONMENT

June-July 2009

LIGHTFAIR International 2009:

 Sustainable Lighting

 in the Age of Somewhat Green  

The 20^th Annual Showcase of the International Association of Lighting Designers took place the first week of May in New York City at the Jacob Javits C Center on the city’s West Side . The show included 475 national and international manufacturers, and hosted more than 23,000 visitors. This is not a show for everyone, but the products on display reflect the emphasis on sustainable lighting and sustainable design in the Age of Green, which does indeed affect everyone.

 By Ekim Sedlof

The other day the power went out in my house. Nothing worked. Not the refrigerator, the TV, the DVD player, mobile phone charger, lights, nothing … Fortunately, I was able to use daylight to find my way around and get the things I needed in case the situation went on overnight. I keep a long-handled flashlight handy for just such occasions, and used it to wend my way to my office, which is in the basement, where my laptop sat open on the desk, virtually useless without internet access that had gone down when power was cut to the wireless router and cable modem. I couldn’t access e-mail, and I didn’t feel like typing – or writing longhand (remember that?). A couple of green LEDs flashed on the modem, but they were running on the internal battery and indicated there was a live cable feed into the house, but none of the gadgets hooked up to it could operate. Thus, I was cast back 150 years. “Lost.” What was it like in the good old, bad old days, the simpler time before the fruits of technology befell us? By sundown, the answer became abundantly clear:  “Dark and quiet.”

What’s this have to do with sustainable lighting or "green" design? In an era when electrical power is more in demand than ever, and the resources to produce that energy are in decreasing supply, solid-state lighting featuring LEDs, the highlight (excuse the pun) of IALD '09,  is coming into its own. Advantages of LEDs are many. Lumen for lumen, watt for watt, LEDs are lighter, last longer and require less power than many other lighting methods. As proof, the LIGHTFAIR 2009 presented the latest and greatest developments in architectural and novelty lighting from around the world. For many visitors, that meant viewing exhibits from behind the protective lenses of designer sunglasses.

When I last toured the show about ten years ago, fluorescent, halogen, high-intensity discharge and low-voltage lighting were the rage, and LEDs, generally red, amphibian green or yellow, were not quite ready for prime time lighting. White LEDs, with their glaring, bluish-white coloration were still ticks on the horizon. Lifetimes were long, but color and brightness varied greatly over the life of the LED, and for many applications that was just not satisfactory.  

Technology Evolves

 Since then, LED technologies have evolved, and with them, uses for LEDs have gone from simple indicators on the fronts of computers and remote control devices, to automotive taillights, flashlights, traffic beacons, LCD backlighting, signage, gaming, outdoor lighting for parking lots and building facades, multi-color stage lighting, electronic billboards, microscope illumination, flat panel displays, and much, much more. This year’s show was an eye opener, not just to the applications where LEDs are being used, but to the advances that have been made in the electronic engineering, chemistry, physics and packaging that have made them the latest in a long line of light sources, starting with the sun, and continuing through lightning, forest fires, moss, dung and wood flames, wax candles, whale oil lamps, natural gas lanterns, incandescent and fluorescent bulbs, radium watch dials, and all their assorted (and sordid) cousins.  

LEDs are semiconductors. Light sources such as incandescent, fluorescent and high-intensity discharge lamps, are based on gas-filled glass enclosures with filaments or electrodes, and various coatings, and as little as 10 percent of the power they use is converted to light. These conventional sources give off ultraviolet and infrared light, which can burn or damage artworks and fabrics. Not so with LEDs.  

LEDs are current driven devices; they require special power supplies and constant current converters to maintain color and brightness as the electrical and physical characteristics of the LEDs change with age. This means that in addition to the design and manufacturing of LEDs, there is a growing industry of power supply and control manufacturers, packaging specialists, lighting designers, distributors and retailers to support the growth of solid-state lighting. Not only do LEDs consume less power than alternative lighting devices, when properly driven, they can have a useful life of 50,000 to 100,000 hours. That’s 12 years running 24/7.

The bane of LEDs is high junction temperatures, which can shorten their effective life considerably. Heat sinks built into LED rails, and LEDs encased in tooled aluminum cowls, increase the cost of the devices, but the resulting extended lifetimes can readily offset the added costs. Lighting companies involved with LEDs deal with aesthetic considerations, as well, and handsome, properly designed LED lighting is now used both inside and outside some of the newest, most luxurious structures being built.

On the waste management side, LEDs don’t use mercury, as do fluorescent tubes commonly used in office and household lighting, and many LCDs (where they provide the light that allows you to read your flat computer screen). LEDs have the potential to eliminate the use of tons of mercury, which ultimately ends up in landfills. While the chemistry of LEDs is not totally “clean”, they’re a whole lot more efficient and easily disposed of than incandescent and fluorescent lamps. At the end of the day, when global warming, disposal and other environmental concerns top the list of “to-dos”, LEDs light the way to reduced toxic waste.  

Going Solar

 In parallel with LED developments is the continuing engineering of solar panels. Solar isn’t just a curiosity used on lawn lights, anymore. Increased efficiency and lower cost of panels make them ideally suited to use with LEDs where grid power installations are not feasible or cost effective. Flexible solar panels can be wrapped around light poles to generate current stored in batteries, thus enabling wireless street and parking lot lighting. Among exhibitors of outdoor lighting products were Inovus Solar, of Boise, Idaho (high efficiency LED fixtures for street lighting, using flexible solar the height of the mounting pole, with the battery and computer controls enclosed in the base -- www.inovussolar.com); Carmanah Technologies Corp., of Victoria, British Columbia, (www.carmanah.com); and, Sunrise Technologies, Inc., of Raynham, Mass., (www.fpolc.com).  

The L Prize

 The U.S. Department of Energy had a booth with regular and well-attended training sessions where visitors could pick up information on the L Prize competition, a partnership of the DOE and major utilities “from coast to coast to promote super-efficient solid-state lighting products to replace today’s most common light bulbs….” The competition “is designed to spur development of high quality solid-state lighting products capable of replacing the most widely used and inefficient products: 60 W incandescent lamps and PAR 38 halogen lamps.” (Competition requirements can be viewed at www.lightingprize.org.)

The motivating factor in the partnership is to drive down cost, which will make SSL products more affordable. “New technologies are almost always more expensive when first brought to market, due to low volumes and high development costs. By joining together to represent significant demand, the U.S. government and L Prize partners drive sales volumes up and prices down far more quickly than would otherwise be possible.” (See also, www.lprize@pnl.gov)

In addition, the DOE booth offered visitors a variety of white papers, including “LED Basics”, “Using LEDs To Their Best Advantage”, “Color Quality of White LEDs”, “Color Rendering Index and LEDs”,  “Dimming” and “ENERGY STAR ® Criteria for Solid-State Lighting Products”.  Much of this information is available on the DOE web site, www.eere.energy.gov.  

The Future is Now

The Moda fashion show at Javits ran concurrent with the lighting show, giving further evidence that specialty lighting is an integral part of our world.

 Most of us aren’t going to be very interested in the technical aspects of lighting and lighting design represented at IALD. But in our daily lives, we all use many of the items on exhibit, often without knowing it. For example, if your day job is in a multi-story building with little access to perimeter offices where sunlight comes through windows, it's possible there are daylight lighting systems that bring sunlight from rooftop collectors into the dark hearts of urban high-rise buildings. One of the companies that makes these products, Solatube International, displayed its 21-inch diameter, flexible duct with a highly reflective interior surface that bounces light from a roof top Fresnel lens down as many three to four floors, thus extending the hours of daylighting available for those interior spaces. The product is promoted as “ideal for commercial use in projects such as schools, offices, warehouses and retail stores.”

You may never have worked in a television studio or on stage, but everyone knows stage lighting can be very hot. Altman Stage Lighting company, in Yonkers , New York , tackles this problem with multi-color stage lights using LEDs that can be controlled for brightness and hue using a fraction of the power required by older technologies. And, the finished products are smaller and lighter than previous lights.

There's more to be said on practical, technical and aesthetic levels about lighting fundamentals, controls and solutions, applications, innovation and case studies. But at the end of the day, when the sun goes down, these new technologies are for everyone. LIGHTFAIR provides an opportunity to see what's on -- and sometimes over -- the lighting design horizon.   

For more information on IALD and LIGHTFAIR 2010, 

see www.lightfair.com.