Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for Aug. 4, 2021. Our Endeavor Business Media LED & Lighting Group is spending much of this week in strategy and planning meetings. Some of the team gathered in person. I among others opted to not travel given the surge of the Delta COVID-19 variant. And even as our meetings have unfolded, our company rolled back some of the safety policies that had been loosened in recent months. It’s not hard to find similar instances in the mainstream news. And I see this morning that LightFair International will have stringent requirements for who can visit the October event.
I intended to stay away from mentioning the surge this week. I was planning a more positive column. But what I kept thinking about last night when I should have been fast asleep is the old saying “We don’t know what we don’t know.” How do you make strategic decisions when you don’t know when or if we fully escape the pandemic? Moreover, the indirect effects are worse than the direct effects as I noted in a presentation I made yesterday.
Indeed, the impact on supply chain remains profound and has long ago crossed my daily life. I was trying to buy my mother a piece of furniture to no avail. A local store said they hoped to have some normalcy and inventory by the beginning of 2022. In the coming weeks, you will see some of the results of our planning meetings in the form of program and events announcements. I hope our crystal ball is good.
Meanwhile, our news of the week has trended back in the direction of germicidal ultraviolet (GUV) technology. Our Mark Halper wrote an interesting article about regulatory policy relative to UV-C radiation. It turns out that some UV-C sources also generate ozone, which can be hazardous on top of the fact that the UV-C emissions could damage eyes and skin. The California Air Resource Board (CARB) is now testing UV-C products for ozone emission.
Acuity Brands has been withholding UV-C troffers from the California market over the CARB policy. Now Acuity says that CARB has tested and approved its EvolAIR UV-C fixtures for upper-air disinfection. For more information on upper air disinfection, see our UV-C Special Reports that we produced in three issues. The most recent covered UV-C in commercial spaces and links backed to the earlier articles.
We also have coverage of two connected-outdoor lighting projects for you this week. The interesting angle is that even small towns are finding the installation of connected solid-state lighting affordable. Compounded energy savings will pay the freight and return on investment comes in just a few years.
There will be a lot on the Strategies in Light agenda with regard to connected lighting. You can read about some of those plans in a recently-published preview article. It’s hard to believe that the event is only three weeks away.
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) 208-9442, [email protected]