Submitted by EnergyTechStocks.com
For every business sick of changing light bulbs and paying high electric bills, there’s a “new user experience” coming. Depending on the application, light bulbs either are already here or will be shortly that don’t have to be changed and that use only a fraction of the electricity that incandescent bulbs use.
They will be called “light engines,” according to Frank Shinneman, CEO of Westhampton, NJ-based Lamina Lighting, referring to new light-emitting diode (LED) technologies. Shinneman said Lamina, an LED technologies developer, has started selling LED socket replaceable bulbs that, “You will never have to change again.” He added, “There’s a wave coming at us,” as first businesses and then, eventually, homeowners switch en mass to LED lighting. “The time is now,” Shinneman further said. “The market is ready for change.”
“Building lighting will dramatically change” over the next 10 years, said Mike Bauer, CEO of publicly-traded Nexxus Lighting in Charlotte, NC, adding that the potential is “huge” for white LED lighting. Nexxus sells solid-state LED systems and controls. Robert McCulley, head of global sales for Herndon, VA-based Renaissance Lighting, a solid-state lighting technology developer, said healthcare, hospitality and educational facilities are in the vanguard of LED adopters that have pushed his company into a period of “incredible growth.”
“Companies are under pressure to reduce operating budgets,” emphasized Jeff Bisberg, CEO of Boulder, CO-based Albeo Lighting, an LED lighting developer, adding that the market for LEDs also is rapidly growing because companies are under tremendous pressure to “re-market” themselves as green companies, with lighting one of the easiest ways to accomplish this. Bisberg further said that the LED market for large industrial facilities already is “growing quite rapidly.”
The four executives agreed that the LED market should continue to grow in part because the current favorite in energy-efficient lighting, the compact fluorescent light (CFL), has a mercury disposal problem, and because the U.S. government’s energy efficiency program (Energy Star) will soon have solid-state lighting standards. In addition, architects are anxious in this down market to sell their new designs as being energy efficient, with lighting at the top of the list. In the U.S. “green” builders and architects are being helped by a growing number of communities starting to change local ordinances on energy consumption, the executives said.
“We’re at the tip of an iceberg,” said Bisberg of Albeo. “Something new and radically different is taking shape. LEDs will enable new products that have never been conceived of.”