By Deb Lovig

We’ve got three more LED City Council Meetings on the calendar, including the first in China. Come join us in Miami, Ann Arbor or Shanghai. We’ve got a great group of speakers lined up for Oct. 1 at the Miami Art Museum.

You’ll hear from the Cities of Raleigh and Ann Arbor, as well as Miami/Dade County. They share their experiences with LED lighting and their plans for deploying this energy efficient new lighting technology. You’ll also hear about some LED lighting incentive programs ONCOR is offering its customers in the Dallas area.

Miami/Dade County is also sponsoring an energy-efficient lighting expo in the Miami Library building a few steps from the Art Museum so attendees can talk directly to LED lighting vendors throughout the day.

By Deb Lovig

I was in Welland, Ontario yesterday for the LED City Council meeting, where a variety of local officials and LED lighting gurus came together to share their experiences with other officials considering LED lighting for their cities or universities.

Here are some pics of Welland LED City Council Meeting speakers in front of one of the city’s latest LED street light installs along with Cree Product Marketing Manager Paul Scheidt (in the black Cree T-shirt). The city’s new fixtures are from from EcoFit, BetaLED and Roadway Lighting.

 

By Deb Lovig

We’ve been upfront over the last few years that the purchase cost of LED lights is generally higher, sometimes a lot higher than traditional lights. This stumbling block slows the adoption of LED lighting and prevents cities from starting to reap the energy and maintenance costs they can realize with quality LED lights. While we can show significant energy savings and maintenance cost avoidance, cities are still struggling to find ways to fund their desired deployment of LED lights.

I am now hearing from quite a number of firms and funds that have recently been formed to address this issue. There are for-profit and nonprofit firms and groups contacting cities and the LED City program to offer performance contracting and/or a wide range of financing options to help cities get the upfront funds they need to begin serious deployment of LED lighting in applications and installations that can offer attractive financial savings over the life of the fixtures.

This is so new that we are all looking for proof points – financing deals that work. I’d like to know if your city is working with a third party to finance LED lighting and I’d like to share information about how the deal is structured is this blog so we can all start learning about what works for financing options and what doesn’t.

Let me know what’s working for your city – post it here!

By Ginny Skalski

In 1964, the city of Durham, NC, began construction on its first parking garage. The Corcoran Parking Garage is still heavily used more than 45 years later, providing daytime parking for downtown workers and evening parking for theater-goers at the Durham Performing Arts Center and even baseball fans at the nearby Durham Bulls Athletic Park.

Renovations on the aging garage began last year, and are being wrapped up this month. Among the new features are 200 LED lighting fixtures, which dramatically improve visibility in the newly-painted garage.

City officials say the new LED fixtures use only one-fifth of the energy consumed by the metal halide fixtures they replaced. At the 0:52 mark in this video, you’ll really notice the dramatic difference in lighting if you look at the contrast of the orange high pressure sodium streetlight glowing in front of the garage.

As part of other renovations, the City of Durham is currently installing LED lighting in another downtown parking deck and has plans for yet another. The Bull City, as it’s affectionately called by locals, joined the LED City program last month, and plans to continue considering energy-efficient LED lighting as it renovates and constructs new buildings and structures.

For a look at some original photos of the Corcoran Parking Garage as it was being built in 1964, check out this blog post on Endangered Durham.

By Ginny Skalski

CBS News recently visited some of the top LED lighting manufacturers in the industry – including Cree – to discuss the demise of Thomas Edison’s light bulb and the rise of LED Lighting.

The resulting 6-minute news package is packed with some good information about why CFLs aren’t the solution to the upcoming incandescent ban (many incandescent bulbs will be banned widely come 2014). If you’re not into video, you can read the CBS News story here.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

By Deb Lovig

With the days getting longer and hotter it’s the perfect time to consider holiday decorating. Crazy talk, you say? Well, one of participants in the LED City program wants guidance on which LED strand lights (Christmas lights) perform best.

My experience with LED lighting in the holiday and festive lighting application is not relevant. I bought LED strand lights for holiday decorations a couple years back but they were purple (on purpose) and I only used them one year and decided to purchase new white LED lights this year. I haven’t had enough different brands in use for long enough to weigh-in on this issue.

Photo by Flickr user amalthyz

 My community service offering on this is to recommend that you not buy purple lights. Period. I’ll give you mine if you persist.

Seriously, considering weather, wear-and-tear for set-up and removal for storage, or ongoing climate issues if the lights are left in place year ‘round, this is a harsh application for tender little strands of LEDs. If you have some recommendations for solid performing holiday-type LED strand lights, please post them here. Thanks!

By Ginny Skalski

Cree LED lights will soon light up kitchens in thousands of homes built by Habitat for Humanity. Last month,Cree announced its three-year, $1.5 million pledge to Habitat for Humanity International to provide our newest LED downlight for the kitchens in all new Habitat homes built in the United States.

Specifically we’ll be providing our CR6™ downlight, which is targeted to go to market this summer for about $60 each. This 10.5 Watt downlight is designed to last 50,000 hours, which means if homeowners use these lights four hours a day, they shouldn’t have to replace them for more than 30 years.

We’re very excited about this pledge because it can help reduce electricity costs for low-income homeowners. Habitat for Humanity already works to build homes that are more sustainable and efficient, and the addition of LED lights will help these homes save more energy.

In North Carolina, a Habitat homeowner should save almost $450 over five years by having the CR6 down lights installed instead of the currently-used halogens.* For a house in California, that jumps to nearly $600 in savings.*

A couple of weeks ago, I got to visit a Habitat home being built in Durham, NC. We delivered two of the CR6 downlights. My boss climbed up on a ladder to show the crew how to install the lights. All he did was take the trim off the existing fixture, unscrew the energy-wasting Halogen light and screwed in the CR6. Since I filmed him doing it, I was able to time him, and it took him 28 seconds! But you’ll have to take my word for it, because I’m not sure he’s ready to make his YouTube debut quite yet.

However, I also filmed the installation of the next CR6 by David Larkins, the construction director for Habitat for Humanity of Durham. I pulled him aside afterward to talk to him about the LED lights that were just installed. At the time he had no idea Cree was planning on putting these lights in kitchens at thousands of Habitat homes. Here’s what David had to say:

“We try to make a house that’s really easy to maintain, and energy efficiency is part of that,” he said. “A lot of the energy-efficiency improvements that we do just make a home that is smarter and simpler to maintain.”

Cree designed the CR6 specifically to make LED lighting more affordable for residential applications and we couldn’t think of a better residential application than inside homes for Habitat for Humanity.

*We came to this conclusion by using a North Carolina electricity rate of 9.42 cents per kWh and a California rate of 15.69 cents per kWh. We calculated four lights turned on 6 hours a day.

By Deb Lovig

The City of Durham (NC) joined the LED City® program today, announcing deployment of more than 500 LED garage lights as a strategic step toward carbon emissions reduction.

Check out the beautiful LED lighting inside Durham's Corcoran Parking Deck.

I’ve been working with Tobin Freid for the past couple years. She’s the Durham City and County sustainability manager and she’s enthusiastic about LED lighting.

Tobin believes, along with many other city officials I’ve talked with in North Carolina, that LED lighting, especially for large area outdoor applications, will be key to helping cities meet their aggressive carbon emission reduction goals.

Durham County officials are in lock-step with Durham City officials on deploying LED lighting and we welcome both the city and county as the newest participants in the LED City program.

And, the Raleigh LED City Council Meeting has been set for June 3 at the Raleigh Convention Center. City, county, university and state officials from North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia are welcome to attend this day-long informational forum to hear from Raleigh, Ann Arbor and Danville, VA, officials who have worked for years (it won’t take that long now!) to deploy LED lighting in their cities for energy and maintenance cost savings as well as to help meet their carbon emission reductions goals. Join us if you can. You can RSVP here.

By Deb Lovig

This year’s Lightfair International (May 12-14) in Las Vegas offers a new level of informational and educational opportunities with regard to LED lighting. While I would love to say these opportunities are happening during the regular conference sessions – we are all trying to get more LED sessions into the line-up – it seems that the exhibit area is where you can find some very good educational stuff happening.

Visit the DOE Solid-State Lighting booth #2121 to learn about a variety of relevant topics ranging from the basics of SSL to CALiPER testing. The DOE promises to have sessions running every 30 minutes from 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday and from 10 to 11:30 a.m. Thursday.

Visit the California Lighting Technology Center’s booth #2034 to hear from experts on topics ranging from selecting light sources and fixtures to control systems. The CLTC folks are BIG into controls for LED lighting systems.

Lighting solution provider Digi-Key is sponsoring a lighting technology symposium at the PURE night club May 13 from 4 to 8 p.m.  Click here to register.

Visit as many of the booths as you can to see the newest and best in LED lighting options. We expect to see some amazing new products.

And if this is your first time at Lightfair, here are 7 tips for making the most out of the event.

By Deb Lovig

When you’re overly interested in LED lighting, you seem to find it everywhere. Okay, that’s an exaggeration but not a huge stretch.

Fourteen Cree LED zealots, in Frankfurt for the L+B show in April, got an extended stay due to the volcanic ash cloud that grounded flights to and from a large portion of Europe.

Faced with a fair amount of free time to wander Germany, we set out for the Rhine River to experience the lovely villages, castles and wineries of the region. One stop was Rudesheim, billed as a romantic tourist haven by our trusted van drivers. “Shopping” is the actual description they gave.

A cable car ride up to the Niederwald Monument sold us on the stop at Rudesheim. (For the record, the skies were clear and blue – no volcanic ash in sight.) This very large monument, (132 feet high, 120 feet wide) was completed in 1883 to commemorate the re-establishment of the German empire:

Up top at the Niederwald we enjoyed the surprisingly sunny, warm and crisp afternoon atop a hill overlooking the Rhine. We took many photos, made many calls back home and reveled in the views.

We never get far from our work. We soon discovered that lights in the monument viewing area were LED. Made with Cree LEDs!

Seems each person in our group had to inspect the lights:

 

And, we took some “official” photos just in case Rudesheim wants to join the LED City® program. That’s my professional angle anyway.