Save Money with LED Lighting

While navigating through economic troubles, shifting real estate, and uncertainty for all businesses, commercial property managers and owners have been hard pressed to find cost savings opportunities. Solutions may range from turning off lights at night to reduced landscaping. Cost savings strategies run across the spectrum and can often leave tenants making sacrifices.

One critical area to all office buildings is the emergency exit fire tower staircases. These spaces need to be properly illuminated around the clock.LED Saving Solutions Science and Research Department has determined that property owners are collectively spending about $54 million dollars more than needed to light the stairwells. However, by installing high efficiency, ultra long-life LED tubes, building owners would be able to achieve dramatic savings on these rarely used but always lit portions of the buildings, according to data published by Cushman and Wakefield 2009 United States Office Report and confirmed by a leading commercial real estate professional in the greater Boston metropolitan area.

It is estimated that of the 1.5 billion square feet of central business district (CBD) office inventory, the average floor plate is approximately 25,000 square feet. Because fire code typically requires approximately one fire escape per 10,000, research calculations indicate that there must be approximately 150,000 doors to fire escapes in the nation. With proper illumination, LED Saving Solutions has determined that with an 80% savings using LED tube retrofit bulbs, the nation could save approximately $54 million, spending only $13.5 million per year rather than the $67.5 million necessary for the currently used low-tech fluorescent tubes. Over the term of the LED Saving Solution saving share program, which runs seven to eight years, the total collective savings would reach or exceed $400 million.

Furthermore, a lighting retrofit ensures less maintenance, greater safety, and better illumination for tenants. In all, it’s a winning opportunity for tenants, managers and owners.

Savings Share Program

Because the expense of replacing lighting, particularly in buildings, can be expensive, LED Saving Solutions forged a financing program with financial and lighting partners to make energy efficiency within reach even in an economic downturn.

“Our Energy Savings Share program allows property owners and tenants to retrofit lighting with LED Bulbs that can save 80 percent on lighting costs and last for decades,” Charlie Szoradi, president of LED Saving Solutions said. “Our program includes free lighting energy audits and reports, free demonstrations with sample bulbs on-site at the property, free installation, and arrangements that include zero down and monthly payments that are less than the monthly savings. This structure delivers positive cash flow in the very first month.”

Date Announced: 14 Aug 2009

Cincinnati, OH — The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey recently announced that it has completed installing energy-efficient LED lighting on the iconic necklace of the George Washington Bridge.

LSI Industries, under contract to the New York Power Authority (NYPA) and in coordination with the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, developed and produced this innovative lighting system.

The new LED necklace lighting is now lit by 156 Crossover® LED NL fixtures and the benefits are many when compared to the previous mercury vapor fixtures –

Dramatically more efficient light distribution
Reduced energy usage
60,000-hour life expectancy (approximately 15 years as
compared to one-year life expectancy for the previous lighting
220,000-pound estimated reduction of carbon dioxide per year

LSI is currently engaged with NYPA on several other LED bridge retrofits in the New York area.

Contact
Minda Matthews-Smith

E-mail: minda.matthews@lsi-industries.com

Web Site: www.lsi-industries.com

WASHINGTON — One way the United States could slash its electricity use, dependence on fossil fuels and emissions of heat-trapping gases is really quite simple: better light bulbs. The Department of Energy is backing research and development aimed at getting light-emitting diodes into common use in homes and businesses at a price that saves money.

Hurdles remain: Costs are still high, the quality of what’s on the market varies, and not all the technical issues have been worked out. But energy experts are confident that this new lighting is the future and that energy savings will be enormous.

Lighting consumes 22 percent of electricity in the United States. The DOE predicts that solid-state lighting — which uses semiconducting materials to convert electricity into light, and includes LEDs — has the potential to reduce energy use for lighting by one-third by 2030. That’s the equivalent of saving the output of 40 large (1,000-megawatt) power plants, the greenhouse-gas emissions of 47 million cars and $30 billion.

LEDs already light universities from Miami to Anchorage, Alaska, streets in many cities and an increasing number of businesses that need lights on all the time.

“In your home, lighting may be 10 percent of your bill. But in an office building it’s probably 40 percent, and so if you reduce your lighting-energy consumption by a large fraction, the savings will be huge,” said James Brodrick, who leads the DOE’s solid-state lighting program.

A fact sheet from Brodrick’s office says this about LEDs: “In the coming decade, they will become a key to affordable net-zero energy buildings, buildings that produce at least as much energy annually as they use from the grid.”

The technology is advancing quickly, and costs will continue to drop, Brodrick said. The DOE tests LEDs and sets performance and efficiency guidelines under its Energy Star program. LEDs are directional lights, used in recessed lighting and under-counter lights, for example. They’re not yet available as bulbs that cast light all around and fit in ordinary sockets.

“There’s an enormous and exciting potential, but we have a long way to go before we see anything besides directional lighting,” said Jeffrey P. Harris, the vice president for programs at the Alliance to Save Energy, a nonprofit group that promotes energy efficiency.

Even so, LEDs already are used to light offices, hotels, restaurants and other businesses.

The DOE predicts that LEDs will have better performance capability than fluorescent lighting in the next few years and that they will continue to improve after that. They’re now comparable with fluorescent fixtures in efficiency, and the DOE says its Energy Star LEDs last two to five times longer.

Cost is the biggest reason that LEDs aren’t used more widely, Brodrick said.

A common PAR 38 floodlight at Home Depot, for example, costs about $35 online as an LED, about $3.70 apiece in a pack of 15 as a halogen floodlight and about $11 for a compact fluorescent.

Chuck Swoboda, the chairman and CEO of Cree Inc. of Durham, N.C., a leading company in LED lighting, said commercial use of LEDs would drive down costs and that a lower initial cost, plus the value of energy savings, would make them attractive. “It’s not that different from the argument of why you should put insulation in a home,” he said.

LEDs have other advantages: They can be dimmed, don’t emit heat, don’t contain mercury — unlike compact fluorescents — and can produce warm-toned light.

Swoboda said Cree was focusing on commercial sales now because that market was bigger than the residential market and commercial users got quicker paybacks from reduced energy and maintenance costs.

Home Depot, the world’s biggest retailer of light bulbs, is starting to stock LED bulbs this summer and plans to have 10 kinds this month, said Jorge Fernandez, who is in charge of light-bulb purchases for the company.

“There’s definitely a lot of interest, but the price is high, and a lot of people say they’re waiting to see when the price drops,” he said.

Felicia Spagnoli, a spokeswoman for Philips Lighting Electronics North America, said commercial users could make up for the higher costs of LEDs in as little as a year or two.

“We can address environmental concerns at the same time we improve the quality and use of light,” she said. “Many people, when they think of doing good for the environment, think it means going without or having lesser quality, but that’s absolutely not the case with LEDs.”

Swoboda said some of the biggest commercial users for LEDs now were fast-food restaurants because LED light makes food look appealing.

A McDonald’s that opened in July in Cary, N.C., is lit almost entirely with daylight and LED lights. Ric Richards, the franchise owner, said the restaurant used 78 percent less electricity than a traditional one.

And the quality of the light?

“Awesome,” he said. “The restaurant has great ambience.”

Richards estimated that the upfront costs of the lighting would be paid back in two to four years with lower electricity bills.

In Washington, the Pentagon is installing LED lights in a large renovation. Mark Buffler, an official in charge of technology in the secretary of defense’s office, said in a report that switching from conventional fluorescents to LEDs would conserve large amounts of energy — 240,000 kilowatt hours annually — and save money on maintenance and mercury disposal.

Published: September 5, 2009

In light of tougher federal fuel economy and emissions standards, automotive engineers have found what may be a surprising way to wring an extra mile per gallon out of today’s vehicles: proper lighting.  “While current vehicle lighting has many benefits, it’s also very inefficient,” said David Hulick, global product marketing manager at OSRAM SYLVANIA for its automotive LED systems division.  “The incandescent bulbs in today’s automotive lighting applications generate more heat than light, requiring more electrical power.  “The vehicle’s gasoline engine generates electricity, but it cannot do so very efficiently,” added Hulick. “The more energy needed, the harder the engine has to work, increasing fuel usage and greenhouse gas emissions.”

Engineers are moving to lights powered by light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. Unlike incandescent bulbs, LEDs have no filament, so more of the electricity is used to make light, not heat. An LED can make the same amount of light as an incandescent bulb with 85 percent less energy. LEDs are also free of contaminants such as mercury or cadmium and are designed to last a vehicle’s lifetime.

Many of today’s vehicles utilize LED signal and tail lighting, including the 2010 Ford Mustang.  The vehicle uses the OSRAM SYLVANIA’s JOULE system, which incorporates LEDs into a form that resembles a typical incandescent bulb, making it easier to adapt the new technology to current vehicle design.
The vehicle’s LED tail lamps use 87 percent less electricity than the incandescent counterparts.  That’s an annual savings of 10.5 gallons of gasoline and 205 fewer pounds of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. “Multiply those savings by the nearly 250 million registered light-duty vehicles on America’s roads and you can see the impact that LED lighting could have on helping to clean up the environment,” said Hulick.

The automotive lighting could play an even bigger role moving forward as more hybridelectric and full-electric vehicles come to market. A recent study by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) compared the power consumption of an electric vehicle equipped with all-incandescent lighting to a vehicle equipped with all-LED lighting.  According to UMTRI, the increased efficiency of LED lighting has the potential to extend the range of the electric vehicle by up to 2 percent of the total distance driven. That equates to as much as one to two full battery charges for the current generation of electric vehicles.

To learn more about LED automotive lighting, visit  www.osram. com.

Montvale, NJ (September 2009) – Pascack Hills High School, one of the top 15 public schools in New Jersey, joined forces with Millennium Visual Systems, one of the top LED sign designers and producers in the United States, to create a real-time information display positioned at the entrance to Pascack Hills High School’s recently renovated campus.

This LED electronic display creates an attention-grabbing, energy efficient and worry-free way to keep current messages front and center for students, parents, teachers and community members. This sign will be used to display time-sensitive information about school events and the school’s athletic program. When necessary, it will also be used to display amber alerts and other emergency messages. The weather will no longer inhibit the school from posting up-to-date information, as it did with the old letter display that was replaced. Around the clock, their highly visible and vibrant messages can be spotted from one of the busiest intersections in Montvale, NJ

Sarah Van Gunten, Pascack Hills High School Principal, expressed her enthusiasm for the newly installed sign saying, “We are happy to have such a visible means of communicating with parents, students, and the community at large” While, Jeff Schneider, the President of the Parent-Teacher Organization (PTO) which donated the display to the school, adds, “We have had great feedback from the community and we are so pleased with the results.”

Millennium Visual Systems, headquartered in Woodcliff Lake, NJ with Business Operations in Chestnut Ridge, NY, designs, produces, sells, and services electronic signs and programmable displays that are widely used in restaurants, convenience stores, retail businesses, schools, hospitals, offices, factories and government facilities. Millennium Visual Systems is a 12 year-young company with expert staff that assists clients in all aspects of a project. From concept development, to installation, to follow-up, Millennium Visual Systems ensures customer satisfaction with ongoing hardware and software support and service. For more information please call (845) 356-4100, visit at www.millenniumvisuals.com, or find them on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.

Chestnut Ridge, NY- (September 2009) Millennium Visual Systems, one of the areas leading designers and producers of LED electronic signs and programmable displays, has entered the world of social media with a bang. Now, with a blog, twitter account and facebook page there are more ways than ever before to stay updated on the exciting new products Millennium Visual Systems is placing across the United States.

Millennium Visual Systems’ blog is an electrifying insight into the world of LED technology. The blog is updated regularly with all the latest and greatest information involving the technology that has helped unite towns, grow businesses and keep communities safe. The blog capitalizes on the great energy efficient aspects of LED signs.  For more information please visit the blog at www.millenniumvisuals.com/blog/

Owner/CEO of Millennium Visual Systems, Dave Goldberg, emphasizes the importance of the sites saying, “These new social networking outlets allow for our community to be updated on all the exciting news within Millennium Visual Systems.” Twitter and Facebook create an atmosphere of open sharing that will facilitate both employees and customers to voice their opinion on the Company and show their individual experience with the Company’s  high quality products and world-class customer service.

Millennium Visual Systems is a 12 year-young company with expert staff that assists clients in all aspects of a project, from concept development to installation to follow-up, ensuring project satisfaction with ongoing hardware and software support and service. MVS successfully provides superior products across the USA. For more information please call (845) 356-4100 or visit www.millenniumvisuals.com.

By John Timmer

Organic LEDs, or OLEDs, promise to bring flexible, transparent displays to the market, but some researchers have found a way to get the same effect by printing microscopic inorganic LEDs onto plastic and glass.

Organic light emitting diodes, or OLEDs, promise to bring a great deal of flexibility to where we can put a display—literally. Because of their organic components, it should be possible to create flexible and transparent displays, opening up a large number of potential uses. But now, just as OLEDs may finally be ready for the consumer market, some engineers have figured out a way to get many of the same properties using inorganic LEDs (ILEDs), using a method that’s so simple, even a biologist could understand it. It’s a few years away—at least—from commercialization, but it’s a significant advance.

The paper that describes the process will be published today in Science. The basic idea is that, since LEDs are so efficient at converting electrical charges to light, the human eye can detect the light of very small LEDs. As a result, it’s possible to make a display out of a surface where only a small fraction is occupied by the actual LEDs, which can be small enough to be invisible to the naked eye. Under these conditions, the display will take on the properties of whatever material the LEDs are embedded in: bendable, transparent, etc.

Unfortunately, although we’ve gotten rather good at depositing the layered structure needed for making a normal ILED, the manufacturing processes we use don’t scale down to the size of individual pixels in a typical display, which need to be on the order of 100µm or less. So the researchers came up with a simple solution: make a big one, and then chop it into little pieces.

The researchers started with a permanent substrate topped with aluminum arsenide, and layered on all the typical materials (gallium, indium, phosphorous, etc.) needed to create an LED that would glow red. When that was completed, they used a technique called plasma ion etching to cut a rectangular grid into the slab, leaving behind small squares, approximately 50µm across, held in place by the AlAs substrate. The squares were then anchored in place by a small bit of material in two corners, and the AlAs substrate was etched away with hydrofluoric acid. What was left was a grid of small LEDs held in place by two small posts that could be broken away easily.

This array, however, is packed so tightly that it would completely obscure any surface it was transferred to. So the authors crafted printing devices from a flexible material that only contains slots for a subset of the total LED square (say, every third one). The elastic material can pick up the LEDs, “print” them onto a separate surface, and then return to the original source and pick up the next set over. By adjusting how far apart the LED slots are—every second LED in the grid, or every fifth—it’s possible to print out devices with different spacing.

The authors prepared a flexible plastic surface by laying down a grid of wiring, printed the LEDs on it, and then locked them in place with epoxy; a second mesh of wiring completed the circuit. Given an adhesive, the plastic could be applied to just about anything. For demonstration purposes, the authors stuck it to a glass cylinder. They also created a wiring grid that acted as a passive matrix, allowing them to activate individual LEDs in the grid. For these applications, the LEDs only took up about one percent of the total surface, enough to leave it transparent (provided they weren’t lit, obviously).

The authors also demonstrated how to create a bendable display. By pre-stretching the flexible plastic substrate before laying down the wiring, the wiring would buckle within the material when tension was relaxed. This provided enough slack to accommodate a fair degree of flexibility in the final material.

If, at this point, you think you’re missing something, you’re not—it really is that simple.

That said, it’s still a long way from being ready for the market. The authors say that none of the LEDs failed during testing, but some of the wiring leading into the device wasn’t up to the strains of their test procedures. As a result, most of the individual devices they made had rows of dead pixels. All the devices only worked in red, as well. Still, the process uses well-understood materials and techniques, so there’s no reason it can’t be rapidly improved on, and the transition to a production environment doesn’t seem to face any major stumbling blocks.

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) – U.S. researchers said on Thursday they have found a way to make large-scale flexible display screens that can be stretched to fit the contours of a bus yet are transparent enough so riders can see out windows.

The thin, light screens might be used to make brake light indicators that follow the contours of a car, or health monitors or imaging devices that wrap around a patient like a blanket, said John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose study appears in the journal Science.

He said the large display screens combine the scale and durability of light-emitting diodes, or LED technology, used to make flat, lighted billboards, with the flexibility of screens made using organic — carbon-containing — materials.

“If you look at these giant billboard displays along the road side, those are made out of inorganic light emitting diodes (LEDs). Our feeling is those systems are quite impressive,” Rogers said in a telephone interview.

“The question became is it possible to take that technology and use it in a non-billboard format.”

Rogers said current technology using inorganic materials produces chunky individual LED lights that need to be arranged piecemeal with a robotic arm. Screens made using organic materials can be sprayed or painted onto a film surface, but they are not as bright or durable, he said.

To solve this challenge, researchers built their LEDs on a thin layer of film later dissolved by a chemical and then affixed tiny plastic tabs on two corners to ensure the LEDs did not wash away in the chemical bath.

The team used a special stamping technology to deposit and assemble the inorganic LEDs onto glass, plastic or rubber surfaces. The system works much like a rubber stamp and ink pad, using the LEDs as ink.

“The new approach can lift large numbers of small, thin LEDs from the wafer in one step, and then print them onto a substrate in another step,” Rogers said.

The LEDs can be interconnected and wired with a conventional process used to wire computer chips, he added. And because LEDs can be placed far apart and still provide enough light, the panels and displays can be nearly transparent.

“We can put them on a strip of plastic and make brake lights,” said Rogers, who noted that the project was initially funded in part by Ford Motor Co, which was looking for a way to make brake lights that can follow the contour of a car.

The National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy also funded the project.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Paul Simao)

While there’s no question that LED lamps use a fraction of the energy to produce the same amount of light compared with a standard incandescent bulb, several Bits readers have pointed out that that’s only half the story.

If the energy used to create and dispose of the LED lamp is more than that for a comparable standard bulb, then all of the proclaimed energy savings to produce light are for naught.

Until recently, no one knew if that was the case. In March, a preliminary study reported by Carnegie Mellon indicated that LED lamps were more energy efficient throughout their life, but the researchers pointed out that not every aspect of the production process was taken into account.

A new study released on Tuesday by Osram, the German lighting giant, claims to have confirmed the efficiency findings.

Conducted by the Siemens Corporate Technology Centre for Eco Innovations (Siemens is the parent of Osram and Sylvania), the report examines the energy needed to create and power an LED lamp. Even the energy needed to ship a lamp from the factory in China to an installation in Europe was taken into account.

The study used a 25,000-hour LED lamp life as a constant, comparing the energy needed throughout its life to that used for 25 1,000-hour incandescents and 2.5 10,000-hour compact fluorescents.

The findings, according to a summary of the study: today’s LED lamps are essentially as energy efficient as compact fluorescents, in the amount of energy needed to create, recycle and provide light. Osram said it expected those numbers to improve as LEDs become more energy efficient.

The company issued no in-depth information to support its claims. It said that confirming data will be released this fall, after review by three independent analysts.

But assuming the numbers hold, this total Life Cycle Assessment should put to rest any lingering doubts about the overall “greenness” of LEDs.