DOE’s main solid-state lighting proponent, Jim Brodrick, recently reported in from the DOE SSL workshop, just held in San Francisco, for those who couldn’t make it with one of his best letters (“Postings: From the Desk of Jim Brodrick”) to date. The conference presentations, by the way, should be published on the DOE SSL website within the next few weeks. (As another by the way, the DOE’s SSL site recently moved from www.netl.doe.gov/ssl to www.ssl.energy.gov.)

After the final session, Jim was asked to name three important things he had learned or regarded as being reinforced over the previous three days. One of them struck a nerve with me as particularly important. I’ll let Jim speak for himself, so to quote:

To paraphrase Kevin Dowling of Philips Color Kinetics during his discussion of PAR38 LED lamps: “If you try to shoehorn [LED] technology into existing forms, you are going to be faced with tremendous and costly tradeoffs. There are more efficient ways to use LED technology. Edison sockets were never made to remove heat from the source.” While Kevin was talking about PAR38s, he could have been talking about any instance in which the marriage of LEDs with traditional luminaire designs is attempted. The end result is rarely, if ever, any good. Despite some thinking to the contrary, just replacing an incandescent or fluorescent light source with an LED source does not make for a quality and efficient luminaire.

To paraphrase Jeff Dross of Kichler during his workshop presentation, “LEDs in themselves are not the solution. How the LEDs are effectively used to meet customer needs is the solution.” Although Kichler is at the upper end of traditional luminaire manufacturers, they have found that they must totally reevaluate their approach to the design of any type of fixture to adequately exploit the advantages of LEDs. Jeff left us with three important things to think about when designing LED luminaires and I again paraphrase in my own words–“Don’t try to replicate incandescents; don’t prepackage LEDs to fit into any luminaire; and don’t dumb down the technology.

These admonitions are very important to those of us who are just beginning to learn about the power of LEDs (no pun intended) to reduce electricity usage. “White light” LED luminaires can and will foster tremendous energy savings, but they should not be viewed as an immediate panacea. This is still a very young industry that requires a great deal of maturation before we are able to gauge its true energy efficiency impact. The important thing that I have learned over time, and the thing that I hope all those attending our workshop absorbed, is that there are very good products already on the market, but one has to consider more LED properties than just lumens per watt. Comparing incandescents with “quality” LED luminaires is like comparing the 1909 Model T Ford with today’s most efficient cars. As forms of transportation, the Model T and the modern-day car are big improvements over the first automobile. But the similarity ends there.

Craig DiLouie

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