Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for Dec. 29, 2021. I continue to find moments to reflect on the past year since the end of 2021 has come closer and closer. You’ll find some of those musings in our usual blog posting, which won’t publish until Friday, but look for it to feature in next week’s News & Insights.
I will tease out that despite the economic, logistical, and public-health challenges of the past two years, I have renewed confidence that innovation and ingenuity will prevail across the LED and solid-state lighting (SSL) sectors. Progress in product engineering, intelligent systems, and application of a constantly-evolving knowledge base have remained hallmarks of this industry.
At first it might seem a stretch, but reviewing our annual Top 20 list is what got my wheels turning. I jumped into my time machine and went back to 2013, the year I joined the LEDs Magazine team. It’s noteworthy that the bulk of the most-popular content that year revolved around the A-lamp. As increases in efficacy and cost reductions have transpired over the years, retrofit lamps play a much smaller role in our current lineup. But one of our most popular articles this year, on a California program targeting the replacement of linear fluorescent lamps with quality retrofit options, emphasized that the installed base of commercial & industrial (C&I) lighting (including what I would label as “institutional” — healthcare, education) remains a largely unpenetrated market for SSL. It also represents enormous opportunity for greater application of R&D and design methodologies that can enhance human wellbeing and quality of experience in the built environment, as we reported early this year after the US Department of Energy (DOE) Lighting R&D Workshop.
So, having looked back on 2021 and even further into the past, what do I see for the road ahead? I could demur and observe that I’ll have more to say on the subject after the next DOE Workshop in late January. Still, I think investigation into 3-D printing, more-sustainable and circular materials and design techniques, and refined strategies for outdoor lighting that reduce its impact on the ecosystem, while preserving public safety, will keep the LED and SSL community busy. And the urgency of climate impacts and burdens on energy infrastructure will move the needle on sophisticated lighting controls capability. I don’t anticipate that network level controls (NLC) and luminaire-level lighting controls (LLLC) will spar for dominance. Rather, they will serve as appropriate in individual indoor and outdoor scenarios. Thus, municipal planners, facilities managers, architects, designers, and specifiers will be increasingly required to collaborate, rather than work in silos, to select and implement best solutions for the application scenario — avoiding unnecessary complexity and even technology obsolescence.
You’ll find more of interest in the body of today’s newsletter. Please keep in touch about content we post or to pitch a contributed article.
- Carrie Meadows, (603) 891-9382, [email protected]