Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for Dec. 9, 2020. Our Product Demo Days kicked off yesterday with new product and technology video presentations in eight separate sectors covered by media brands in our Endeavor Business Media Advanced Technology group. The virtual event continues today. There is a lot of information for you in the LED and Lighting sector and in other sectors such as broadband, imaging, and photonics.
The turn of the calendar to December has brought an unexpected flurry of news coinciding with other flurries of snow across the globe. And we have several additional items in the news hopper that we are trying to learn more about before considering a bylined news story, so stay tuned later this week.
The US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has published very interesting research on the cost of implementing effective circadian lighting. For now, lighting specification that delivers on published circadian recommendations would add considerably to the cost of the installation and more so to the energy-usage bill. There may be technology-centric solutions to the problem, but there will remain a significant premium associated with lighting for health and wellbeing.
Meanwhile, the automotive solid-state lighting (SSL) sector remains an area of growth even with subpar auto sales due to the pandemic. And car designers can move forward with cabin lighting implementations that borrow significantly from the layered approaches common in high-end architectural lighting in indoor settings. The trend is enabled by auto-qualified packaged LEDs such as the new Ostune products from Osram Opto Semiconductors. The high-CRI LEDs are offered across a broad range of CCTs, and multichannel designs can also offer tuning across that range.
We had a HortiCann newsletter that we deployed Monday. We slipped in one late story into the links in the body of that newsletter, but I didn’t mention it in the introduction, so I will do so here. GE Current announced a partnership with North Carolina State University to study the impact of SSL on specific cannabis growth stages such as flowering. The research will actually focus on hemp, but the results will likely be applicable across all cannabis strains.
We also have a new web exclusive feature article for you this week. David Shiller and Juan Carlos Blacker have written on SSL incentive programs for commercial and industrial (C&I) applications with an eye toward changes attributable to the ongoing pandemic. Read to prepare for the year 2021 that just can’t come soon enough.
Archived material from our Renaissance of Light Quality event will expire in mid-January. Act now if you need a refresher on any of that content. Moreover, the HortiCann Light + Tech 2020 content will only be available for another month.
You will find many more stories of interest in the body of today’s newsletter. And always feel free to contact me to discuss content we post or to pitch a contributed article.
- Maury Wright, (858) 748-6785, [email protected]