By Deb Lovig

It’s official. EVERYONE is joining the LED Lighting Revolution. At least that’s the way it appeared at the Light+Building show recently in Frankfurt, Germany. It’s too large a show to hit every booth but those I did visit or pass by (it’s a six-day show so you do pass by a lot of booths) were leading with LED lighting products, real or nearly real.

I took some photos of some new (mostly LED) street lights in an outdoor display in the courtyard outside Hall 4.

At the LED City® Council Meeting held during the show Peter Nissen from Stadtwerke Flensburg spoke about his city’s efforts to convert to LED street lighting. He showed some interesting photos of really broken-down street lights. He says many cities in Germany are at a critical point ─ they must replace old, rusted out lights. From his photos I’d say they waited a little too long to invest in new street lights!

German cities Flensburg and Bremen, represented by Holger Janssen of swb, have been evaluating LED street lights and both cities are sold on the technology. Their only concern is higher up-front costs they incur when purchasing LED lights. I am pleased to share that Bremen is the first German and newest LED City.

If you can read German, Peter and Holger’s presentations can be found at:

http://www.ledcity.org/attend_meeting.htm

Finally, just for grins. Take a look at these funky, cocoon-like lights we saw in the OMS L+B booth:

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

The next LED City® Council Meeting will be held April 14 during the international Light +Building trade show, which is being held April 11-16 at the Messe Frankfurt exhibition site in Frankfurt, Germany. This meeting will feature speakers from two German cities – Bremen and Flensburg – as well as Ann Arbor, MI, and the Clinton Climate Initiative.

Not only will attendees hear from their peers about the benefits of LED lighting, they will be able to visit the booths at L+B to see the latest and greatest LED lighting products. We’ll post the meeting presentations on the LEDCity website after the meeting so everyone can get a glance at what we shared. Here’s some more information about the companies showing their LED lights at L+B.

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

Sometimes others say things so well that it’s best just to point you right on to them. Treehugger.com recently wrote about some research coming from the University of Pittsburgh with regard to energy-efficient street lights. 

You’ll see that they put some hard numbers behind the LED hype that are far in favor of moving to LED for street lighting applications. Hope this helps with decisions you are making in your city.

By Ginny Skalski

Most people who visit Indian Wells, California, are probably drawn in by the four world class resorts, the spas and the lush golf courses. The resort community in the southern California desert became a retreat for celebrities after Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz opened the Indian Wells Hotel in 1958. Since then, city officials have worked to make Indian Wells a premiere destination in the Coachella Valley.

These days, city officials are keen on sustainability, and energy-use reduction has become a key goal for the city. I had the “tough” job of visiting Indian Wells last month for an LED City^® Council meeting, and while I was there I had the city’s management analyst Susan Weisbart give me a tour of some of the city’s LED lighting installations.

Indian Wells was the first California city to become an LED City. The LED City program helps municipalities speed up the adoption of energy-saving LED lights by connecting them with information they need to make informed decisions about installing LED lights.

One of the first LED lighting installations in Indian Wells involved swapping out incandescent lights that lit the outside of city hall and other municipal buildings with 12 Watt Cree LR6™ recessed lights. It’s a change that city officials say saves nearly $7,000 a year in energy costs. That’s not counting the maintenance savings of not having to replace burned out bulbs, since the LED lights they installed are designed to last 50,000 hours – or 17 years if they’re on 8 hours a day!

The city also has plans to replace the 50 Watt halogen lights illuminating the signature palm trees lining city streets with 11 Watt LED lights. Get this: The city estimates it can save $10,095 in energy costs per year once the project is complete!

Watch my LED tour and interview with Susan to see what Indian Wells is doing to save energy and money:

By Deb Lovig

Most street lights in the U.S. are owned by utilities companies. They provide use of these lights to cities on a sort of leasing system called tariff. The amount a city pays to “lease” the lights is meant to cover the installation, cost of electricity as well as the cost of the light fixture/pole and ongoing and periodic maintenance including replacement when necessary.

In most places, a city may pay a monthly rate per light of $7 to $53 depending on the fixture selected and the cost to service that fixture. Under this lease arrangement, the cost of this off-peak electricity is a small part of the overall monthly rate. Most of the cost goes to pay for the capital investment in the lighting equipment. A few utilities have a flat or average charge per light for all street light fixtures, regardless of the cost of the equipment, the amount of maintenance required or electricity used.

This rate structure has provided investor-owned utilities the necessary vehicle to earn an allowed rate of return, set by the utilities commission in each state, to be profitable and keep investors happy.

So this sexy new LED street lighting comes along and everyone, including the utilities, gets excited about saving a lot of energy, putting a lot less waste into the landfill and saving taxpayers a good chunk of change on maintenance avoidance. However, if LED lighting reduces by 50 percent or more the amount of electricity that will be used and therefore billed by the utility and maintenance costs go down to a bare minimum for the next 10-15 years, just how will the investor-owned utility pay for the higher cost of this new LED equipment, offer an attractive monthly rate to municipalities and make an allowed rate of return?

Progress Energy lineman James LeBlanc installs an LED fixture.

With these key questions looming, most utilities don’t yet offer any sort of lowered rate for LED street lights. And, this has been a major STOP sign for most municipalities that are investigating LED street lighting.

There’s no clear solution at this point but Raleigh’s own Progress Energy Carolina is taking a leadership role in trying to find a good solution or in this case, two good solutions. The North Carolina Utilities Commission and the Public Service Commission of South Carolina just approved a request from Progress Energy Carolinas to offer two new options for reduced rates on LED street lights.

Progress Energy Carolina’s Bob Henderson is quite pleased with this outcome. He tells us that the first option is a bundled all-in-one utility-owned rate where the municipality pays a month fee, like before, which includes purchase of the equipment, electricity used, installation, maintenance and replacement of the LED street light when necessary. The new rate differs from the past in that it is in two parts ─ a fixed basic rate and a variable section. As the prices of the LED fixtures decrease, Progress Energy Carolinas can adjust its pricing accordingly (that’s the variable part) without having to seek commission approval for the rate change.

The second option allows the city to purchase the same approved LED street lights directly from the manufacturer. Cities that qualify can use stimulus funds, grants or low-interest loans to purchase the fixtures and their monthly rate to cover installation, electricity used and maintenance will be roughly half of the cost of the first option. If a fixture replacement is required, the municipality will be responsible for providing another fixture to Progress Energy Carolinas (PEC) to be installed. City-owned fixtures will sport a special label and will be installed on PEC-owned poles. You can see which products are included now in the PEC new rate structure here.

The Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI) folks are providing financial assessment guidance to cities and towns in Progress Energy Carolinas’ service territory using the new LED street light rate structures. Their spreadsheet model can assist municipalities with determining which option is best for them and provide an idea of the payback offered by a switch to LED lighting. The CCI folks have been working steadily along helping the world’s largest cities, like Los Angeles, figure out how to pilot and then purchase and deploy LED street lights. They have put extra effort in assisting the industry with the biggest stumbling block to LED lighting  it costs more money up-front than conventional lights.

If you want to learn more about all this, the Progress Energy Carolinas lighting team is working with the local IES Raleigh chapter to provide a forum (workshop and webinar) April 14. At this event, they plan to share with other utilities and their vendor support personnel the “behind the scenes” details, considerations, experience and passion that went into developing these new rate structures, change-out procedures, specification standards with regard to the roll-out of LED lighting at PEC. Check it out:  http://www.iesraleigh.org/seminarevents.htm

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