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 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 Deb Lovig

LEDs can be made from a variety of materials, the very first in the early 1900s being akin to sandpaper grit. In Cree’s case, the basic material is a compound called silicon carbide (SiC) – okay, so it’s sort of fancy sandpaper grit.

In 1995 a master gem cutter took a look at Cree’s SiC and suggested that if properly cut, SiC could be crafted into diamond-like gems. Soon, a company called Charles & Colvard was formed to manufacture and sell these new “stones” under the brand name Moissanite®.  Interestingly, as Cree continued to improve its processes for producing SiC over the years, the Moissanite jewels have become even more “perfect” in appearance.

Fast forward to early 2010 when Cree started making what can be described as the “most beautiful” LED, the Cree XLamp® MP-L . While sending a few of these gorgeous multi-chip LEDs out to be photographed, all we could think was, “These would be great as earrings.”

A good friend of ours in Durham makes fine handcrafted jewelry and she readily agrees that the MP-L is “seriously beautiful.” She set to work making earrings! Take a look:

Our ad agency boasts a team member who also makes some very interesting jewelry and she came up with a sweet earring design as well:

As we worked the booth at the first big lighting industry trade show of the year last week – L+B – we were pitching (and wearing) some pretty incredible LEDs.

Wonder what we’ll wear at LFI in Las Vegas next month…

And, no, the LED jewelry is not battery-powered.

By Deb Lovig

One of the best ways to become familiar with a lot of LED fixtures, especially new fixtures, is to attend one of the major lighting industry trade shows. Many LED fixture makers gear their new product launches for one of these shows. For city officials who are interested in learning more about LED fixtures and the vendors who make them, the major lighting trade shows offer up a concentration of vendors who are more than willing to show and demonstrate their new and existing LED fixtures.

Here’s a cheat sheet to help you plan your exhibition crawl on the quest for great LED light.

The first major lighting show this year is Light+Building. L+B is held every two years in Frankfurt, Germany. This year the event will be held April 11-16 at the Messe Frankfurt exhibition center. Bring your walking shoes so you can be comfortable walking through building after building of exhibits. Two years ago we were pleasantly surprised at how many vendors were showing LED products. This year we are running a competition among ourselves to see which booths DON’T have LED lighting because we think most everyone will have at least a few LED solutions to show. Rest assured that when we find a non-LED booth we will “help” them understand the folly of their ways.

Next on the trade show circuit is Lightfair International in Las Vegas. This show is held every year, alternating between New York and Las Vegas. This year Lightfair will be held May 12-14 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. I’ve already suggested to a number of U.S. city officials that they plan a two or three-day trip to Lightfair to meet with vendors and to get a preview of the new products coming into the market this year.

Here's a look at the Cree booth at Lightfair 2009.

Rounding out the first half of 2010 is Guangzhou Lighting 2010. This show will be held June 6-9 at the China Import and Export Fair Pazhou Complex.

And, if you haven’t yet gotten your fill of new LED lighting products, the Hong Kong International Lighting Fair is scheduled for Oct. 27-30 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.

By Deb Lovig

Vice President Joe Biden made a special trip to Durham last week to tour the Cree facilities and meet with the folks here responsible for manufacturing LEDs. Cree is innovating, growing and HIRING! The vice president came to Cree to draw attention to the fact that we need more U.S. companies manufacturing in the U.S. Here’s a picture from his visit. Note that all the lights in the room are LED lights!

Here are a couple news reports from his visit:

Nightline goes on the road to Durham, NC, with the vice president for “Day in the Life of Joe Biden.”

Also had a nice national piece through Associated Press: “Biden: Manufacturing Key for Middle Class Wages.”

You can also watch some of our YouTube coverage of the event:

By Deb Lovig

Heavy snow heaped over large portions of the U.S. this winter spurred some seriously negative media attention on the performance of LED traffic signals. Reports of snow covered signals being blamed for traffic accidents in snow storms appeared all over the media.

Some of the folks in participating cities of the LED City® initiative got a little concerned this negative coverage might spill over and somehow affect their ability to move forward with LED street lights. Street lights are a different animal so we mostly tried to stay out of the way of the negative traffic signal stuff.

At the LED City Council Meeting in Indian Wells this week, the question of whether the LEDs should be deep-sixed for not being hot enough to melt the snow on traffic signals came up. Speaking up in defense of LED traffic signals was Bruce Kinzey, who works at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for the Department of Energy and was one of the expert presenters at the meeting.

One of his colleagues had the misfortune to be in Washington, D.C., during a recent heavy snow dump. Here’s the photo he took of an incandescent-based traffic signal there.

‘Nuff said. And, if you want to take a look at Bruce’s informative LED City Council Meeting presentation, you can access it here.

By Deb Lovig

The next informational LED City® Council Meeting will be held Tuesday in Indian Wells, CA. For some of us, this will be the first warm, sunny weather we’ve seen since October…. I highly recommend that if you live in the middle or eastern part of the U.S. that you come west to learn more about the concrete and aesthetic benefits of LED lighting for the municipal setting – in Indian Wells.

The purpose of LED City Council Meetings is to share the experience, expertise and excitement of LED lighting as it is realized by cities that participate in the LED City program.  The Department of Energy is also presenting at some of our meetings as well as some local utilities. It’s a jam-packed day of all things LED lighting – geared for the municipal or university.

Feedback on the quality and scope of the information presented at the first two meetings has been extremely positive. And, we offer the opportunity for attendees to meet with LED light fixtures makers who set up demonstration tables at the events.

For more information about these meetings, and to find one near you, visit: http://www.ledcity.org/attend_meeting.htm

By Deb Lovig

A while back I got an email from Jean Ronel, an entrepreneur and visionary based in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He and a colleague realized that the one thing that would help so many Haitian communities, even those painfully remote mountain villages running on generator-power, is solar-powered path and street lights.

They got some heavy-duty training and mentoring in the U.S. and set off back to Haiti to try to build solar panels and LED street lights, by hand, that could be affordable and useful for any Haitian community. They ordered up parts from the web, messed around with a few different designs and came up with a great solution at an amazing price.

He sent me some photos – they tell an amazing story. Take a look and be prepared to be humbled and astonished and excited.

We talked to him via telephone a few weeks ago and his team at Enersa, the name of his organization, had grown to hundreds of young people now skilled in the art of handcrafting solar panels and LED lights, attaching them to poles and selling them at the amazing affordable price. Read more about their efforts and see photos here.

Business was booming and cities and villages throughout the island were finding ways to purchase one to three lights at a time. Turns out, a single solar-powered LED street light mounted at a key path intersection can do a world of good for safety, flexibility and transportation of people and goods at night. Has any community in the U.S. EVER considered the purchase of one single street light?

We originally wanted the world to know of Jean Ronel and Enersa and we wanted to rally the LED industry around his efforts. We had big ideas of major media coverage, new funds supporting his effort and the villages he is serving. On the morning of Jan. 12, as we stopped to notice that there is a lot more going on in the world than LED lighting…we started to wonder, then worry.

I emailed Jean Ronel in the aftermath of that first terrible earthquake. “Are you and your team okay? Is there any way we can help?”

Jean Ronel responded, “I was very lucky. I’m OK, my family also is OK. All the ENERSA employees are OK, only the plant was destroyed. We are thinking about how we can restart. Right now it is very difficult, since Gvt does not exist. Every Gvt buildings are destroyed. Thanks you for your help, we will let you know very soon.”

If even one of Enersa’s LED street lights is operational at this time, his vision is true. To reach Jean Ronel and Enersa directly, email  Enersahaiti (at) gmail (dot)com.

By Deb Lovig

We LED folks love our industry and we also dig cool stuff related to LEDs. Setting rockin’ flashlights aside for a moment, let’s talk Ts.

Our friends at UnScrewAmerica.com have just the type of creative genus that desires mention. Visit the site, but more importantly get the shirt: LEDs Rock. You’ll love the look and feel and darned if you don’t receive admiring remarks every time you wear it. Seriously.

And, no, they are not backlit with LEDs. They’re not that geeky…but that might be kinda cool. You can purchase them at toporanch.com, another creator of incredibly cool, genius T-shirts.

Hey, and if you get the shirt and rig it with a white LED or two, send us a photo!